Process "sdcard" keeps CPU busy and causes battery drain

Bug Reports
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#1

REPRODUCIBILITY (% or how often): ?
BUILD ID: 3.3.0.16
HARDWARE (Jolla1, Tablet, XA2,…): Xperia 10 dual SIM non +
UI LANGUAGE:German
REGRESSION: (compared to previous public release: Yes, No, ?):

DESCRIPTION:

At times, I observe a tremendous battery drain with the Xperia 10 even after all apps are closed and data connections are off (Wifi and mobile data switched off). It is about 20% to 30% battery drain in 5 hours with a device that should be almost fully idle (except for telephony). This occurred a couple of times now.
Today I looked at “top” with fingerterm and found that two (!) processes called “sdcard” took about 80% CPU capacity while there was no apparent access to the SDcard. I manually killed the two processes with the kill command and battery drain is s low as it should be. SDcard is still accessible thereafter (no new mounting required).

The SDcard is not encrypted, while “home” is encrypted

I will now try to figure out the precondtions and try to reproduce the problem.

Maybe someone can tell me what the process “sdcard” does? I guess it not only affectes cpu capacity and battery drain bu also weas the SDcard.

I did not observe this problem wth the XA2

PRECONDITIONS:

STEPS TO REPRODUCE:

EXPECTED RESULT:

ACTUAL RESULT:

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

(Please ALWAYS attach relevant data such as logs, screenshots, etc…)

2 Likes
Monitor CPU usage overnight
#2

Is someone trying to index your sd card? Is any syncing active? Sd card is OK?

#3

@4carlos: I am not aware of any synching neither do I know about any indexing. What bothered my is that it were two processes called “sdcard” that were active and both caused quite some CPU load. However, I am thinking of replacing the SDcard by a new one because even if it is still OK it might fail due to too many cycles in case the processes “sdcard” caused a lot of reading and/or writing.

Thank you for caring!

#4

I would also suggest trying another SD card.

#5

I am seeing this also, and it only appears when Android Support is running.

It does go away after a while though, so I suspect it’s one of the Android processes doing some indexing or such.

Xperia 10 Dual SIM, Rokua

Note: I am not even using an SD Card in this device, but I suspect this process is about emulating the sdcard expected by Android, and does not have anything to do with the physical card.

[EDIT:] Yep, from doing a strings call on the binary I’m quite sure it’s some version of this program which is Google’s sdcardfs mounter.

The exact process is called:

/system/bin/sdcard -f -u 100000 0g 1023 -U 0 /mnt/media_rw/sailfishos_storage sailfishos_storage

Some preliminary debugging:

root@Xperia10:nemo # ps -ef | grep [s]dcard
nemo     24658 24187 34 15:16 ?        00:01:16 /system/bin/sdcard -f -u 100000 -g 1023 -U 0 /mnt/media_rw/sailfishos_storage sailfishos_storage
root@Xperia10:nemo # strace -p 24658
strace: Process 24658 attached
read(11, ^Cstrace: Process 24658 detached
<detached ...>
root@Xperia10:nemo # ls /proc/24658/fd/11 -la
lr-x------    1 root     root            64 Aug 28 15:21 /proc/24658/fd/11 -> anon_inode:inotify
2 Likes
#6

@nephros: I guess you are right. I observed a process called “c.process.media” that apparently has invoked the process “sdcard”. I could not kill the process “c.process.media” as user “nemo” but stopping Android support also made “c.process.media” disappear

1 Like
#7

I’m experiencing the same. The processes sdcard and d.process.media (which should probably be android.process.media) take significant amounts of CPU. This happens after starting the Android support. They will go away after a few minutes. If I restart the Android layer, the same happens again.

Here is a typical top display a couple of minutes after starting Android support:

kuva
kuva969×395 71.1 KB

I’m using Xperia XA2, SFOS 3.4.0.24. No SD card inserted (but as others have mentioned, this isn’t really about physical SD cards).

1 Like
#8

Same here with Xperia 10 and 3.4.0.24. Losing 30% Battery overnight in flight mode (+wifi-off). SD-card is inserted but not mounted.
I also noticed android.process.media and sdcard are constantly running with 5-20% CPU so the device almost never goes to deep sleep.

Side note: there are processes like android.hardware.graphics.com and android.hardware.sensores@1.0-service which are active even after android support was stopped.

1 Like
#9

The problem is that the processes d.process.media and sdcard do not stop running at all thus causing a constant battery drain. Therefore I looked which android processes might run in the background and found MicroG settings running and DB Navigator (German Railway App) although I did not start any of these. Maybe it is one of these that prevents d.process.media from stopping. I will deinstall DB Navigator and see …