Runaway system76-polld process slowing down System76 Oryx Pro and preventing suspend
Spontaneously it seemed like the screen froze. I walked away, gave it a minute, and noticed that notifications still came through and even the time was updating and the wifi signal strength showed its normal fluctuations. Tried ctrl+alt+F2 and ctrl+alt+Fn+F2 to get over to a terminal, and nothing. Closing the lid did not bring on sleep mode.
I’ve plugged in an external USB keyboard and mouse and these are working! The trackpad and built-in keyboard continue to be nonresponsive.
I thought this would be one of those issues you’d have no chance at diagnosing but, good news! Noticed the system was hanging a bit (thankfully not freezing or taking away my remaining input devices) and there appears to be a clear culprit:
system76-polld
using 100% of a CPU.
(two hours later… i was expecting that googling the process would come up with something when i sent this… apparently not.)
So do you know what the issue is? Do you know if it’s safe to kill this process? It’s definitely slowing things down more than using a mere 1 of 12 cores usually does. Here’s a current snapshot of it:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 301 root 20 0 0 0 0 R 93.4 0.0 131:32.73 system76-polld
Here’s some updates.
As mentioned, closing the lid did not suspend. I went to finally shut it off last night, but tried the sleep button in the power/wifi/sound menu first.
The screen went dark and the system was apparently nonresponsive to all input with either keyboard. I tried every console command and every shutdown sequence— even pressing the physical keyboard power button, or holding it down for 3, 5, 10, 15, 30, or 60 seconds didn’t do anything.
I finally unplugged it and let the battery run out to be able to restart it.
No runaway processes now.
So i suppose you can tell anyone else who reports this problem— don’t try a suspend through the menu! Maybe a shutdown through the menu, or command line, would have worked without the system hanging in a way i’ve never experienced before. How is the physical power button not be able to force a hard shutdown?!?