Comment 50 for bug 524281

I have this problem as well in a Lenovo X300 laptop. This has a core 2 duo and an intel graphics driver. I tried powertop under 3 different system states and got some interesting results.

Regular full boot with X running (desktop):

Number of wakeups per second was around 220 and [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick was at about 80 wakeups per second and main culprit.

Full Boot without X running

Number of wakeups per second was around 70 and [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick was at about 25 wakeups and the main culprit

Root shell (recovery mode boot)

Number of wakeups per second was around 10 (!!!!) and [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick was at about 0.5 wakeups

So it looks like this problem occurs when cpu stress particularly from video drivers is applied but can occur due to many sources. Sounds like a bad kernel bug to me.

My laptop runs about 5C warmer with Lucid compared to Karmic so this is very annoying.