Re: 12" G4 Powerbook with heat issues
Am Sat, 7 Jun 2008 15:02:15 -0500
schrieb "Matthew Ray" <matthewhray@gmail.com>:
I run Debian (currently "Lenny") on my PowerBook 12" 1.5 Ghz (same
hardware only faster CPU speed) since over a year now and have run
Ubuntu previously to that.
I found out that the heat management works much better if you have it
managed by the hardware itself without the Linux Kernel interfering. I
used to have the "therm_adt746x" Kernel module active but had lots of
troubles with it. The fan would kick in pretty late and the PowerBook
also got extremely hot. On very CPU intensive tasks it would even power
down hard because of overheating.
There are options you can pass to this module but nothing really helped.
Then I removed the Kernel module ("modprobe -r therm_adt746x") and also
commented it out in the /etc/modules file. Since then I did not have
any problems at all. The PowerBook still gets hot but not nearly as
much and it does not power down as well. Unfortunately it is not
possible to read CPU temperature from /sys/devices/temperature/ anymore
but since everything works i can live with that.
I think the hardware throttles the cpu automaticalle before it becomes
to hot and prevents overheating this way. I also created a script that
checked the cpu temperature regularily and would also throttle the cpu
if it found it to be too hot but since the PowerBook can
apparently handle this by itself anyway I did not bother anymore.
good luck
Andreas
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