From time to time, often after I've restored from sleep or finished playing a Steam game, one of my CPU cores is pinned at 100% with no indication of what might be doing it. Running htop, btop, or GNOME system monitor all show the same thing: CPU0 at 100% while the rest are doing near-nothing, and no process in particular seems to be using those resources.
If I restart, it's back to normal, and sometimes I can play a game in Steam or let the computer go to sleep and it doesn't do this, but it happens often enough that's annoying/confusing so I'd like to know if there's a way to either (a) diagnose which processes are using which CPU cores, or (b) somehow "reset" the checking of these values to make sure that something's not just being misreported.
This is a desktop system running Arch & GNOME.
It’s the Linux version of steam taking advantage of idle time to process shaders. It’s a critical part of making all those proton launched games working right. I wish it had better control for when to run it but it is what it is.
If this were true, OP would see Steam as a user-mode process taking up the CPU time. Since the OP image is sorted by CPU time and the process isn't visible, it's gotta be those kernel threads that aren't displayed by default.