When I close all open programs, except for terminal, the cpu fan keeps running, indicating to me that something is using more cpu than it should. Looking at htop I see a process started by the following command is jumping between 6% and 50% usage of a single core. What does the command do? Can something be done to make it calm down?
/usr/lib/Xorg :0 -seat seat0 -auth /run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch
It’s the X server — X11.
Hi @marli,
…is a display server. It’s very old. It’s been replaced by Wayland on a lot of systems, mine included.
However, I don’t think Xfce supports Wayland yet, so I doubt that’ll be the answer to this. But it might offer an explanation.
Any way to figure out why it uses more cpu now than some months ago? All though I haven’t been monitoring the cpu usage, I do notice the cpu fan is running constantly now. Before it was only running when starting a vm or playing video.
Except dust/whatever build-up, I’ve got nothing.
Providing system information might go some way toward figuring it out. 
Regards.
inxi --filter --verbosity=8
or the short form:
inxi -zv8
I rebooted into 6.12 kernel. The xorg process seem to not use a lot of cpu here. I’ll leave it running for a while and see if it comes back.
As this seems to not be an issue with 6.12 kernel, I suspect the issue may be related to an other issue; that the system has been very unreliable since 6.14 kernel was installed a while back. This continued with 6.15. (Unreliable = freezes if not rebooted at least once a week. Once it even froze an hour after reboot.)
Do you have an AMD GPU, by chance? If so, this is highly likely to be the same issue I am encountering with any kernels 6.12 and up. Check out this thread and see if it echoes what you’re experiencing.
No. Only intel gpu.
Turns out my system froze with 6.12 kernel as well, all though xorg did not have the high cpu usage issue.
Changes I’ve done so far in order to narrow the system freeze issue:
Uninstall 6.15 kernel, leaving 6.12 the only installed. This also included the zfs and vbox modules - and their respective meta packages.
Then ran a full system update (without new kernel).
System has been running for 2 days without issues now, so that may have fixed something, but too early to say.
Now I needed to start cinelerra, and it didn’t start. That made me realize that AUR packages has not been automatically updated. Maybe one of them is causing trouble?
I’m currently rebuilding cinelerra.
Acpilight has been rebuild.
Reiserfsprogs has been uninstalled. (Wonder why that was there. It claims to be explicity installed, but I have not used reiserfs since 2013.)
Other AUR packages installed (not rebuilt after system update):
pdfbooklet (I doubt it can cause trouble)
ricoh-sp150su-sane
scanner-support
v86d
xsane
If system keeps freezing I’ll remove the AUR packages.
System is still freezing. This time the only open program was 4 instances of putty (each with open ssh connection) and 1 local terminal window. Firefox was closed a few minutes before the system froze.
The way the system froze was when I pressed Alt+tab, the other putty window was brought to front, but content was empty. Window header was visible. I used mouse to bring focus to the terminal window, and it came to front with content. I skipped between other putty windows using the mouse, and they worked. Then I clicked the X to close the all black putty window, and the hole screen turned black, except for the mouse pointer. Mouse pointer could not be moved. Ctrl+Alt+[1…7] did not do anything.
Nothing is written to system logs since several minutes before the freeze.
I tried to start memtest86 from grub, but was met with the error:
Error: no suitable video mode found
Booting in blind mode
(I’ll run it from usb once I get a usb stick on hands)
I’ve now uninstalled all AUR packages except for acpilight and cinelerra.
Thinking back, this issue might have occured the first time after the first reboot after I installed a printerdriver from an external media that was not able to unmount after the install - kind of looked like the source of driver file was kept open after install was finished. I may use the computer for upto 10 weeks between reboots. So I have an idea that the issue could be caused by some process trying access the printer driver source after reboot, and at some point (2-4 days) that process does something strange as a result of not getting access to the file. (The printer that was using the driver was uninstalled two reboots ago.)
Now, how can I remove anything that could be related to the printer from the system in order to start fresh with printers? I have uninstalled manjaro-printer with dependencies. I suppose there are config files it has left somewhere?