acpi event 69 made my system unusable

A few days ago, cat /sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/gpe69 gave a count in millions and my system was unusable. After disabling it, all was fine.

Is there a way to know what ACPI event 69 is about?

I have the same issue. I disassembled the ACPI tables and it seems to be a wakeup request from a PCI device attached to the root ports (i.e. PCI addresses 1b.0-1b.7, 1c.0-1c.7, 1d.0-1d.7).

In my case it's the NIC, NVMe disk and the Thunderbolt dock; my money would be on the latter, because I have issues suspending sometimes after using the dock.

I know this is an old topic, but I have the exact same issue on my Lenovo laptop when the Lenovo thunderbolt TB3 dock (gen-2 40AN). Maybe my findings can help others.

Whenever the screen connected to the TB dock goes into standby, the fans ramp up and kworker/kacpi starts hogging 70% CPU, ramping the fans all the way up.

I SSH'd into the system while the screen was in standby (and the fans blowing like crazy). Looking at grep . -r /sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/ I can see that the acpi/interrupts/gpe69 is triggered millions of times.

To verify my suspicion, I disabled the interrupt during runtime:

echo "disable" | sudo tee /sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/gpe69

This helped, the load dropped to 0, fans ramped down. I then tested the system directly (not through SSH) and everything still appeared to run smoothly, maybe even more responsive as before.

To disable the interrupt upon boot, I updated my grub config:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="acpi_mask_gpe=0x69 quiet splash"

I'm still not sure what gpe69 does exactly, but in my case disabling the interrupt made my system quiet, and more responsive.