upowerd hogging CPU while iPhone is connected

Question

It appears that upowerd is hogging my cpu time, I killed the process, but it has returned, and is climbing in resource consumption. Do I need upower? can I disable it?

I am using ubuntu Mate 16.04.

heres a screen-shot from the top command

Solution 1

From @JonasCz, whose comment was:

Do you happen to have an iPhone plugged into your computer ? If so, you may need to select "Trust this computer" on the phone (or disconnect it), which may fix it: bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upower/+bug/861642

Unplugging the Iphone solved the issue, or was an acceptable answer for me.

Solution 2

This just happened when I resumed the computer this morning. Going into suspend last night I had Power Panel left open. This morning Power Panel was all greyed out and the hard disk light was flashing like a disco light show.

I used these commands:

$ ps -aux | grep upowerd | grep -v grep
root      2013  0.5  0.0 349976  7372 ?        Rsl  Aug11  11:12 /usr/lib/upower/upowerd

$ sudo killall -9 upowerd

Of course now upowerd isn't running at all but that's OK it'll come back with the next reboot. I don't use it much anyway just to check when wireless mouse or keyboard batteries are low.

Comments

[JonasCz]

Do you happen to have an iPhone plugged into your computer ? If so, you may need to select "Trust this computer" on the phone (or disconnect it), which may fix it: bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upower/+bug/861642

[j0h]

... why yes, I do, and hey, yeah its fixed!

[Admin]

I have the same problem but I don't have an iPhone plugged in (I don't even have an iPhone!) or any other external device. Only a MicroSD card but upowerd hogs my CPU even with no MicroSD inserted so there must be some other explanation for it.

[LinuxSailorTech]

If the question has been answered please mark the answer so that others do not then see it as unanswered

[Hubro]

@JonasCz Wow, this has been a good day for finding amazingly perfect answers on the first attempt

[Aaron]

Thanks, this helped me too! I "trusted" the computer from my iPhone and that fixed it.

[stolsvik]

Wow, spot on - ripped out the cable: Gone. Psyhco. Didn't help to kill it either, it just came back. (But @JonasCz should have the credit!)

[Tetrinity]

Well that was easy. Crazy stuff...

[Honghe.Wu]

Why iPhone8 can not remember the trust option each time plugged to Ubuntu 16.04?

[Pablo Bianchi]

You can just pgrep -a upowerd to avoid the grep -v

[WinEunuuchs2Unix]

@PabloBianchi Thanks for that! Almost as cool as when I learned about pkill -f <NAME> once instead of using kill <PID> a whole bunch of times.