6.17.0-14-generic | Intel laptop CPU throttling and initrd hang when booting into ubuntu with a black screen
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1564323/6-17-0-14-generic-intel-laptop-cpu-throttling-and-initrd-hang-when-booting-int
I've nearly the last whole 4-5 days attempting to fix some issues which have started happened on my laptop. I'll explain what the original issue was and what the continuing issues are.
ASUS Zenbook 14
Intel Core Ultra 9 (Intel Arc integrated graphics)
GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden
GRUB_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`( . /etc/os-release && echo ${NAME} )`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="intel_idle.max_cstate=1"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
Running stress for about 5 minutes, %usr slowly rose over that time to the second block.
warrantyhub@twinfantasy:~$ mpstat -P all
Linux 6.17.0-14-generic (twinfantasy) 02/25/2026 _x86_64_ (16 CPU)
06:27:56 AM CPU %usr %nice %sys %iowait %irq %soft %steal %guest %gnice %idle
06:27:56 AM all 13.52 0.47 6.22 0.39 0.00 0.07 0.00 0.00 0.00 79.32
warrantyhub@twinfantasy:~$ mpstat -P all
Linux 6.17.0-14-generic (twinfantasy) 02/25/2026 _x86_64_ (16 CPU)
06:32:47 AM CPU %usr %nice %sys %iowait %irq %soft %steal %guest %gnice %idle
06:32:47 AM all 53.52 0.21 4.99 0.25 0.00 0.06 0.00 0.00 0.00 40.97
My laptop has been experiencing minor issues with ubuntu since I installed it. Mostly minor freezes for ~15 seconds during usage or sometimes it would lock up completely. During the times when it would freeze completely I would restart using ALT + PrtSc + REISUB.
I encountered a new issue though last Friday, when going to boot my laptop. I was met with a black screen with the keyboard lights pulsing. I gave it a few minutes but then decided to force shutdown, and every time after that, no luck, it was stuck.
The boot would always hang on "Loading initial ramdisk ..." I'll spare the rest of the details, but after trying numerous BIOS settings and grub linux options eventually I found that the only option that would get my laptop to boot was setting "intel_idle.max_cstate=1"
I figured that it might be related to my CPU being newer, but since making this change to get ubuntu to boot I've run into numerous other problems. Most notably, performance degraded significantly. My CPU frequency, under any workload, would never exceed 400 MHz. Any input was slow, (about 1/3 of a second delay). Scrolling in any application or browser felt painful.
I tried another option "intel_pstate=disable" which seemed to stop the throttling, but performance was only negligibly better. I have experimented with numerous cpupower settings and manual governing but it seems that the CPU always will fall into a idle state which seems to take over a second to wake from. Disabling idle states with cpupower just locked the frequency at 400 MHz again. Disabling thermald also seemed to stop the throttling cap, but the same issues as above remained. Anything which "repaints" a lot of the screen seems to be very slow and stuttery, and my IDE (webstorm/pycharm) is borderline unusable. My mouse takes about a second to start moving when input is given. CPU heavy tasks are also noticeably slower. All of these things worked great outside of freezing issues before this.
My BIOS is up to date and I have latest graphic drivers, I think. All of my power/governor settings are set to performance as far as I am aware. My thermals are also pretty normal, almost never goes above 70 C.
Is this caused by setting max_cstate to 1 or are there other issues that I should diagnose? Any help is greatly appreciated.
P.S. I'm pretty new to Linux, so please correct me if I'm confidently wrong about something. I also don't know which logs would be most helpful, I'll try to respond as quickly as possible to requests.
