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. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
