I am even more embarrassed now. Tons of pacnew files did build up. Unbelievable that I never thought of that. Senior SWE, using Linux for more than 20 years. This is probably my biggest embarrassment yet.
Going to be fun when I get back from holiday and merge all my pacnew files on ubuntu.
I don’t think it would be an actual CPU load of 100% on that particular core, though, because if that were the case, then the temperature readout for that particular core would be a lot higher than can be seen in the second screenshot here-above.
On my system, that particular core always runs just a tad hotter than the other cores anyway, but its current temperature readout of 36°C is not consistent with a core that’s genuinely stuck at 100% — in that case, the temperature readout would probably be somewhere in the 40-50°C range.
So whatever’s causing this apparent 100% load is most likely a bug in the kernel code reporting the core temperatures, and according to the 2023-07-25 Testing update thread, the issue was apparently fixed in 6.4.6. I guess no one thought of backporting it to 6.1 as well.
Oh, and on account of mariadb being the cause — which I doubt, although it may be the trigger — replacing it by postgresql is not an option here because I’m running Plasma, and akonadi requires mariadb. I don’t know whether it would be possible to replace mariadb by mysql proper — I’ll have to investigate that — but mysql is an AUR package, and I would rather not replace an essential component for my desktop environment by an AUR package.
pacnew (and pacsave, etc) are a product of ALPM (pacman, pamac, etc) … you wont have them on Ubuntu. But then you cant roll the same Ubuntu install for years and years. Frozen vs Rolling.
(and a care to preserve user configurations)
So a bit of consolation maybe
It is not fixed in 6.4.6. The Arch Linux Bug Report mentions a LKML thread (without a link) that suggests it is not a Kernel error. However, there is a patch that fixes the problem inside the kernel. The patch comment suggest the high iowait is just a cosmetic issue.
The patch is at the moment not merged, so it is also not backported to any version.
If there is a patch that fixes it inside the kernel — and I already knew about this — then it is a kernel issue.
Yes, that much is true, as I said in my previous post. If it were a genuine 100% load, then the temperature readout for that particular CPU core would be a lot higher, as would the total temperature be for the entire processor chip.
The one thing that didn’t work after the update was my xbox controller. It still connected to bluetooth but it no longer rumbled on connect, and it was no longer recognized by any Steam games.
I simply rebuilt xpadneo-dkms, restarted, and its working again.
I have a strange bug with hanging keystokes after a few hours uptime. I think it started with the 10.7.23 or 17.7.23 update.
All applications seem to open the search bar searching for tabs in a loop and meta key is not working anymore. Nothing special to see in journalctl. The only thing that helps is a reboot.