wahlm Posted June 6, 2020 Share Posted June 6, 2020 I put some fresh armbian buster image to my cubieboard (1). Although no (real) application was installed, a load of around 20-30% could be seen. First I located the K-worker problem on A20 based boards thread and blacklisted sun4i_gpadc and sun4i_gpadc_iio. But after removing my display and booting the system still there was some kworker load almost stopping the system every 5-10 seconds. Digging deeper I found a description and a possible solution of the problem. Looking a my Olimex A20 Lime2 which I am currently testing with the new olimage by Olimex because of the never solved gigabit problems of my board, the same behaviour could be seen. The modules sun4i_gpadc and sun4i_gpadc_iio were already blacklisted, but the headless system showed the same kworker activity. I tried the suggestion and removed the sun4i_drm_hdmi module and immediately the kworker activity stopped and load went down to almost 0. Unfortunately the stock armbian kernel image configures CONFIG_DRM_SUN4I_HDMI not as module. So I had to build my own kernel with setting CONFIG_DRM_SUN4I to m. Then I could remove the sun4i_drm_hdmi module, too. I saw the expected behaviour: The kworker activities are gone and load went down to almost 0. So my suggestion is to change the stock kernel configuration for CONFIG_DRM_SUN4I to module. Then headless users can blacklist the module sun4i_drm_hdmi and don't need to build their own kernels. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Igor Posted June 6, 2020 Share Posted June 6, 2020 15 minutes ago, wahlm said: So my suggestion is to change the stock kernel configuration for CONFIG_DRM_SUN4I to module. Then headless users can blacklist the module sun4i_drm_hdmi and don't need to build their own kernels. Great find This is also a good opportunity to send a small patch with changes to the config to our build system (best to do it for all sunxi configs). Our greatest suffer in this project is a big pile of maintenance tasks and any, even the smallest simple things, take some burden away. Thank you and anyone for implementing it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wahlm Posted June 6, 2020 Author Share Posted June 6, 2020 Thanks for the suggestion! I just forked the repo and will provide a PR. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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