On Wed, Oct 21, 2020 at 01:56:55PM +0200, Julia Lawall wrote: > Prior to 5.8, my machine was using intel_pstate and had few background > tasks. Thus the problem wasn't visible in practice. Starting with 5.8 > the kernel decided that intel_cpufreq would be more appropriate, which > introduced kworkers every 0.004 seconds on all cores. That still doesn't make any sense. Are you running the legacy on-demand thing or something? Rafael, Srinivas, Viresh, how come it defaults to that?