Re: Lenny overheating, preventing installation

The laptop is less than a year old and still in warranty. It has never been
used in dusty or dirty places. And this overheating only happens with Debian
(installing OpenSuSE or Mandriva or Ubuntu or Fedora works a breeze). The only
other instance it does happen is when my current OpenSuSE system freezes
(stops responding), ramping up the CPU to 100% usage: if I don't switch to a
virtual terminal and reboot within, say, 10 minutes, the laptop will shut
itself off from overheating. Hence my assumption that the machine simply is
not DESIGNED to work at full throttle (100% CPU usage) for any length of time.
But I may be wrong, of course.

As a sidenote: I've found a thread on internet a while ago stating that you
may risk overheating and even frying a laptop if you try installing Windows98
as a virtual machine, since Windows98 does not support the CPU "idle"
instruction. I assume something vaguely similar may be going on here. Modern
laptops with fairly powerful CPUs apparently rely on certain subsystems of the
OS to effectively prevent overheating. If some of those subsystems don't work
as expected, overheating will occur. I find it hard to believe there aren't
more laptop users with this sort of problems...

Dne sobota 11 april 2009 ob 13:56:37 je Jochen Schulz napisal(a):
Klistvud:
Dne sobota 11 april 2009 ob 10:47:36 je Jochen Schulz napisal(a):
Does that mean that the fan doesn't turn on at all?

It may help to disable ACPI during installation (boot parameter
acpi=off).

On the contrary, the fan is at its max from the boot on. Problem is, it's
no match for my dual-core Turion when running at its max (2 GHz with 100%
CPU usage). I think it's by design, this laptop just isn't designed to be
running at 100% CPU usage for more than 5 to 10 minutes in a row.

I have trouble believing that. How old is the device? Is there visible
dust in the openings behind the fan? If you are out of warranty, you
should try opening the case and clean it.

Another option might be to manually throttle the CPU during install. You
should be able to Alt-Fn to a VT and then look whether there is a
directory /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/. If it is there, 'cat
scaling_available_governors' should show a governor called "powersave".
Then just 'echo powersave > scaling_governor'.

If any of the directories, files or governors is missing, you need to
find out which modules to load. Or you could try setting the governor in
your BIOS. There are probably options like "battery optimized" and "max
performance".

@acpi=off. I came to that idea too, but have one important question: if I
install the OS with acpi=off, will I be able to enable acpi later on? You
see, I WOULD very much like to use suspend2ram, suspend2disk, CPU
scaling/throttling, display dimming and other capabilities that are
offered by this laptop.

Since this is a boot option, it doesn't persist across reboots, so you
can always switch back. But that probably doesn't help anyway if your
fan already runs at full speed.

J.


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