upowerd/gnome-power-statistics crash; high CPU, memory consumption

[PabloAB]

Not sure if necessary here since same bug is already on:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1427621
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100626
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=781088

Tested on Ubuntu 16.04.3, 4.12.0-041200rc3-generic

Steps to reproduce:
1. have a system with a recent kernel (4.10.x or later)
2. start gnome-power-statistics
3. go to Pprocessor tab
4. have a look at gnome-system-monitor or htop

Result:
- On Processor section, Wakeups tab: "Processor wakeups pers second: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.UPower.GeneralError: cannot enable timerstats."
- High CPU usage of /usr/lib/upower/upowerd
- Crash gnome-power-statistics

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Vincent Gerris (vgerris)]

I see the same error but do not seem to get a high load on 18.04 dev.
The package name is gnome-power-statistics 3.25.90-2 (at least the gui).

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1721282

[Mauro (mauromol)]

I'm experiencing high CPU usage by upowerd in Linux Mint 18.3 KDE (based on Ubuntu 16.04) with 4.15 kernel. I'm not using gnome-power-statistics, but I see the error message about missing /proc/timer_stats in my syslog.
I think it's bug https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100626
Why the fix hasn't been applied to Xenial?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

That was fixed with that commit
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/upower/upower/commit/798588a4

The power statistic is not a main feature and Xenial is not the current LTS, that's rather low priority for a SRU in that serie

[Mauro (mauromol)]

But isn't this a sufficiently severe bug for a LTS release, considering that currenntly supported kernels cause this (so I would say it's a regression) and that when this happens the system battery is drained and the user may even hardly realise why?