Answering my own plea: it looks like killing acpid before starting anything CPU intensive prevents the runaway kacpi_notify process. At least, I made it through a complete gimp build, which is a lot farther than I ever got when acpid was running.
I'd welcome suggestions as to how to pin this down more specifically -- perhaps there's some configuration option I could change to avoid the runaway. I'm not sure where to start in /etc/acpi. I did find some speculation (but no confirmation) that the problem has something to do with monitoring temperature. Maybe if the temp goes too high, that freaks kacpi out for some reason, ironically sending it into a CPU-spinning feedback loop that ensures the temperature stays high? -- runaway kacpi_notify https://launchpad.net/bugs/75174 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
