Comment 88 for bug 1759836

OK, so this is annoying.

The background behind the report I made on 2018-07-03 (message #47) is that I have had a Mint install on a desktop computer (fairly old hardware) and that at some point I started to switch over to the Dell Latitude E6400 laptop that I mentioned (just swap the hard drive, an ssd). This just worked. This is something that didn't use to just work with Linux many years ago and I was pleased that it now does.

At some point, it developed this high cpu use issue (I believe this happened upon the switch to Mint 19 but earlier is possible since my noticing this would depend on how often I tried using the hard drive with the Mint install in the Dell laptop which at this point may not have been that often).

I applied one fix mentioned here & the issue went away (although it broke Bluetooth). I forgot about it for a while.

At some point, I created a full separate install on a USB flash drive just to have an install to play with because I needed something Ubuntu based (Mint being close enough for my purposes) —though I did choose to go with Mate instead of Cinnamon (which is what I have on my main install). Of course, I had the same issue again. I went back to this thread to refresh my memory about fixing the issue and noticed the slightly better fix for the issue mentioned in message #70. The fix worked and I was glad to find that Bluetooth works.

So now came the time when I decided I will be using my main install from my desktop in my laptop again for a period of time and I am surprised to find that when it boots I am greeted with a message advising me that it's "Running in software rendering mode" and that I should expect high cpu use. Then I notice that I'm again having high cpu use even for running in rendering mode (from ~45%-100% —and maybe going closer to 100% over time?).

Investigating this leads me,... right back to here. The issue with the '/97-hid2hci.rules' is gone (having also applied the fis from message #70 on this install) but now I seem to have the same issue as what Gaétan QUENTIN writes about on this thread on message #7 on the date of 2018-05-02.

I attempted the fix from #9 and it did not work. I then attempted the fix from #50 and it got rid of the repeating Nvidia messages mentioned in #7 when executing 'sudo /lib/systemd/systemd-udevd -D'. However, the message "Running in software rendering mode" and cpu use may have gone down slightly but is still extremely high. I don't know how to get rid of this. My inclination was to go to the Driver manager to try to enable the recommended nvidia-340 binary driver but my only allowed choice is 'Continue using a manually installed driver' (the other options, the NVIDIA binary driver and the Nouveau driver are greyed out and not selectable).

Keep in mind that I did not have the issue with previous Mint versions and keep in mind that, after applying the fix described in message #70, a different install of the same Mint version number on the exact same hardware does not have this problem (however, the difference could be that this other install is using Mate).