I am deeply wondering about this top (man page) output in uptime 5 hours 30 minutes only:
top - 00:41:41 up 5:48, 1 user, load average: 0.36, 0.44, 0.63
Tasks: 281 total, 1 running, 280 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 0.2 us, 0.1 sy, 0.0 ni, 99.7 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 31827.3 total, 15894.9 free, 1933.8 used, 13998.6 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 0.0 total, 0.0 free, 0.0 used. 29321.2 avail Mem
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
4567 vlastim+ 20 0 5229056 292040 141472 S 0.5 0.9 9:40.38 cinnamon
278 root -51 0 0 0 0 S 0.2 0.0 7:29.32 irq/140-nvidia
746 root -51 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 5:52.90 irq/142-iwlwifi
1423 root 20 0 25.1g 181056 118612 S 0.3 0.6 5:48.33 Xorg
280 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 2:23.89 nv_queue
276 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:31.17 nvidia-modeset/
17208 root 20 0 0 0 0 I 0.0 0.0 0:15.22 kworker/2:1-events
391 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.1 0.0 0:10.72 jbd2/nvme0n1p2-
21613 vlastim+ 20 0 32.7g 418536 216740 S 0.1 1.3 0:09.15 brave
Laptop specs for question background
Using Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon with kernel 5.15.0-76-generic and Nvidia driver version 535.54.03.
I am playing one specific HTML5 game in Google Chrome (stable), I have some decent specs of my laptop, it's getting old though, I know:
CPU: Intel Core i7-7700HQ @ 2.80GHz base freq. / 3.80 GHz turbo freq.; (4 cores, 8 threads)
RAM: 32 GB DDR4 2400MHz, 2 sticks in dual-channel, disabled swap file
GPU: NVIDIA, GeForce GTX 1060, Max-Q Design, 6 GB GDDR5X VRAM
Display: Believe it or not, my laptop has a 15.6" UltraHD = 4K = 3840x2160 resolution, it was the cause for overheating of my laptop even if doing little tasks, so I have added a "normal" FullHD, and turned the built-in display off. No overheating now even when hours on the game.
The actual question
Sad to say that I do not understand how IRQ works / what they are for. So it is impossible for me to understand why my computer spends so much time dealing with it.
To clarify, from comment: Can they be avoided or limited to some extent? For example, I could switch to cable, which I do not have right now (standard Cat.6, I mean). Would that eliminate the hours of CPU time or would that cause just another IRQ to consume my CPU?
Clues
nvidia-smi
Mon Jul 17 01:41:49 2023
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.54.03 Driver Version: 535.54.03 CUDA Version: 12.2 |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 ... Off | 00000000:01:00.0 On | N/A |
| N/A 48C P0 23W / 60W | 360MiB / 6144MiB | 0% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=======================================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 1423 G /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 132MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 4567 G cinnamon 57MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 21650 G ...ble-features=BlockInsecureDownloads 167MiB |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
wavemon
┌─Interface───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│wlp60s0 (IEEE 802.11), phy 0, reg: n/a, SSID: =CENSORED │
├─Levels──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ │
│link quality: 73% (51/70) │
│======================================================================================================================================================== │
│ │
│ │
│signal level: -59 dBm (1.26 nW) │
│=============================================================================================== │
│ │
├─Statistics──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│RX: 9e+06 (3.26 GiB), drop: 10846 (0.1%) │
│TX: 2e+07 (1.74 GiB), retries: 9k (0.0%) │
├─Info────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│mode: Managed, connected to: =====CENSORED====, time: 6:51h, inactive: 6.0s │
│freq: 5745 MHz, ctr1: 5755 MHz, channel: 149 (width: 40 MHz) │
│rx rate: 360.0 Mbit/s VHT-MCS 8 40MHz short GI VHT-NSS 2, tx rate: 400.0 Mbit/s VHT-MCS 9 40MHz short GI VHT-NSS 2 │
│beacons: 238339, avg sig: -57 dBm, interval: 0.1s, DTIM: 2 │
│power mgt: off, tx-power: 22 dBm (158.49 mW) │
│retry: short limit 7, rts/cts: off, frag: off │
├─Network─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│wlp60s0 (UP RUNNING BROADCAST MULTICAST) │
│mac: =====CENSORED====, qlen: 1000 │
│ip: ==CENSORED==/24 │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
