kacpid eating cpu 99% cpu time!

Hey All,

I have just installed Fedora Core 2 and have been happy, but every once in a while, randomly it seems, a process called kacpid will pop up out of no where and start eating cpu time thus dragging the system down to a crawl... what is it and how can I stop it? Its pid is always 5. And I think it has something to do with the kernel. I could find little help using google. Most hits pertained to laptop problems. I'm running linux a 2GHz pentium IV with 512K ram, a flat panel monitor, 120gig hd, standard stuff, really. any thoughts?

Thomas J. Clancy

Hi,

and welcome to LQ!


The thing is indeed a kernel-daemon process, it handles
power-saving functionality and a few other things that are
specific to ACPI compliant motherboards (like monitoring
temperatures, rpm's of fans, ... ) ...

You probably don't need it on your machine, if it hogs
99% CPU something is definitely wrong with your machine,
either with FUDora's set-up, or with your BIOS' ACPI
implementation...

It should be fairly safe to kill it as root ...


Cheers,
Tink

That's the problem... Even as root, I cannot kill this process. How do I even prevent it from running? Is there a way to prevent it altogether?

tom

There certainly is, it's most likely distro-dependent, though.
In slack I'd just
chmod a-x /etc/rc.d/rc.acpid

No idea how fc handles that kind of thing, but since it's
a RH spawn I'm sure there's a graphical gadget for it ;)



Cheers,
Tink

Thanks for the info. You know, I used to use slackware back in the old days (way way way way back when before there was a 1.0 kernel) and I should have stuck with it... I dont like this FC or RH stuff any more. Still, it's what I have. Of course perhaps I ought to just download slack and be done with it. :-)

by the way, chmoding the acpid files (I found it in two places) didn't work. There still remains a kacpid process that somehow gets spawned (by the kernel, I'm guessing) and at some random time (I'm still guessing here) it goes nuts and starts chewing up processor time for no apparent reason. Sucks. :-(

I had the same problem with debian on a HP nx5000 laptop.

i updated to the latest kernel (via apt-get) and kacpid stopped hogging all the cpu time. but now sometimes (normaly when the laptop is under heavy load) or after the screensaver has ben running the laptop goes slow and in the case of heavy load such as updating my packages the whole thing hangs and arround the processor feels very hot.

any ideas?

I think the issue is to do with the pentium m cooling fan and have started a new thread here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=335401

Ever since I'd posted that problem oh so long ago and had gone through so many distros I finally switched back to Fedora Core, but this time verion 3 and haven't had a problem since. It's been running smoothly on my Dell every since. As for running it on a laptop, no idea. Sorry.

tom

Hi,

Does your fan works?

I think I had the exact same problem when the modules "fan" and "thermal" were not loaded.

So,

modprobe fan

modprobe thermal

Now I have them compiled in the kernel

Hope it helps

Just to help anyone else who is having this problem (or similar symptoms) the solution turned out to be cooling related and was discussed in this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=335401

The problem was that acpi and acpid packages weren't installed on my laptop causing the proessor to over heat and slow to a crawl.

in debian:

apt-get install acpi acpid

Take this with a grain of salt because I’m an absolute Linux beginner, but I had the same problem with Xandros Desktop 4 Professional (on a new eMachines, P4, 1.5 Gb, SATA, NTFS, Vista preinstalled computer) and the following worked for me: I reinstalled Xandros but omitted “KDE3 Supplemental” from the install process and the problem was gone. The description of “KDE3 Supplemental” in the Xandros installation program indicates that , at least for users who are not part of a LAN, it doesn’t do anything you would miss. There were various other solutions proposed on Linux websites but I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to understand them, grub?, debug?, what!?

Caveats:

1) Don’t waste your time contacting Xandros Installation Tech Support, they don’t have a clue. If, like me, you purchased Xandros you paid your $80.00 for nothing (although I do really like Xandros). Accept it as a lesson and go on. I came up with what worked for me using the old tried and true try-this-and-if-it-doesn‘t-work-try-that method of problem solving;

2) since this was an intermittent problem with my computer and sometimes Xandros worked fine and “kacpid” didn’t eat up 98% of my system resources I’m not certain this is a permanent solution, but so far so good; and

3) I have no idea if this is a workable solution for Linux builds other than Xandros but the problem was frustrating enough for me that I wanted to pass on what worked for me and was fairly simple to implement in case it would work for somebody else who, like me, is mystified by Linux esoterica.

Steve8072@msn.com

Take this with a grain of salt because I’m an absolute Linux beginner, but I had the same problem with Xandros Desktop 4 Professional (on a new eMachines, P4, 1.5 Gb, SATA, NTFS, Vista preinstalled computer) and the following worked for me: I reinstalled Xandros but omitted “KDE3 Supplemental” from the install process and the problem was gone. The description of “KDE3 Supplemental” in the Xandros installation program indicates that , at least for users who are not part of a LAN, it doesn’t do anything you would miss. There were various other solutions proposed on Linux websites but I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to understand them, grub?, debug?, what!?

Caveats:

1) Don’t waste your time contacting Xandros Installation Tech Support, they don’t have a clue. If, like me, you purchased Xandros you paid your $80.00 for nothing (although I do really like Xandros). Accept it as a lesson and go on. I came up with what worked for me using the old tried and true try-this-and-if-it-doesn‘t-work-try-that method of problem solving;

2) since this was an intermittent problem with my computer and sometimes Xandros worked fine and “kacpid” didn’t eat up 98% of my system resources I’m not certain this is a permanent solution, but so far so good; and

3) I have no idea if this is a workable solution for Linux builds other than Xandros but the problem was frustrating enough for me that I wanted to pass on what worked for me and was fairly simple to implement in case it would work for somebody else who, like me, is mystified by Linux esoterica.

Steve8072@msn.com

Solution to kacpid which works fine for me :
After booting windows when boot linux kacpid starts, to stop it just cut the power supply to your PC including UPS if any , without shutting down (obviously after saving data) when linux desktop is active. yes i am saying that take the power cord out.

Now switch on the power of ur machine & boot linux, kacpid will not appear.(hopefully)




Remember acpi=off will not work on dual core machines , if you use this only one core will get active
Happy Linuxing,

[QUOTE=Tinkster;1088594]There certainly is, it's most likely distro-dependent, though.
In slack I'd just
chmod a-x /etc/rc.d/rc.acpid

No idea how fc handles that kind of thing, but since it's
a RH spawn I'm sure there's a graphical gadget for it

Indeed there is a graphical gadget for it, just deselect the power management from the startup applications 'gadget' in the system menu (2.6.35.14-96.fc14.i686)
That worked for me. Thanks guys!