Almost everything uses too much CPU and AMD graphics card not detected

Support & Help Requests Hardware
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#1

I’m using 18.04. I recently did an update and suddenly every graphical process mostly pegs the CPU to 90-100% in htop.

Right now I’m only running firefox with 3 tabs open , two tabs of ubuntu-mate.community and a “new tab” tab. I’m also running htop i. As I type all 4 threads take up nearly 40-50% and then drops back to 11-20% I’ve noticed the CPU spikes a lot switching windows. I tried running a virtual machine (ubuntu 18.04) under virtualbox and every CPU thread mazes out and my laptop becomes inoperable. It doesn’t freeze, just runs slow enough to be unusable. Inside the virtual machine the two threads I gave it are constantly pegged at 100% I installed the most current guest additions and extensions for the version of Virtualbox.

Even running something like Software Update will peg one thread to 100% and run very, very slowly.

Also, this laptop has dual Intel and AMD graphics. For some reason the AMD graphics card isn’t being detected now.

the laptop is a Dell latitude 3580 with intel HD Graphics 630 and an AMD R5 M430

hardinfo and inxi also show conflicting info

inxi -C
CPU: Dual core Intel Core i7-7500U (-MT-MCP-) cache: 4096 KB
clock speeds: max: 3500 MHz 1: 400 MHz 2: 400 MHz 3: 400 MHz
4: 400 MHz

hardinfo:
shows CPU as an i7 7500 CPU with 2 cores and 4 threads at 2700 Mhz

*Dell shows it as having a max frequency of 3.5 Ghz, 2 cores, 4 threads

current kernel and such:
|Kernel|Linux 4.15.0-43-generic (x86_64)|
|Version|#46-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 6 14:45:28 UTC 2018|
|C Library|GNU C Library / (Ubuntu GLIBC 2.27-3ubuntu1) 2.27|

The VM is the same as the host OS. .

I’m not sure where to go from here. If you need any info please let me know and any help at all is greatly appreciated.

These problems rarely happened until a week or so ago. As of today they’re nearly constant.

EDIT: I just rebooted and the AMD card is detected now. I’m still having the same CPU issues. Yay and wierd…

CPU throttling When power cord plugged in, now no charge
#2

(1) Do you have the CPU performance set for “Ondemand”? Check with the CPU Frequency Monitor panel app.

(2) Look through /var/log/Xorg.0.log for cases where the AMD GPU wasn’t located.

(3) Look through the system messages, dmesg and /var/log/syslog for messages showing when the GPUs are enabled. Use “dmesg | grep drm”. For the AMD GPU you should see a line saying that the microcode got loaded.

djb

#3

Sorry it took me a long time to get back to you.

For whatever reason things have been fine the last few days. The performance has been consistent across a bunch of reboots. I don’t get it but I’ll take it :slight_smile:

The AMD card is also consistently being detected.

I’ve learned quite a bit about reading logs the last few days and nothing jumps out.

Anyway, regardless I appreciate you answering my OP. You’ve given me another couple tools in my toolbox. :slight_smile: