[CentOS] Overheating on laptop as compared to RHEL

[Ned Slider]

On 14/09/13 16:23, Krishnan V wrote:
> Hi,
>   I have an acer 5738g laptop on which i tried out the centos6.4 live CD.
> The laptop feels noticable hotter and i check the temperature using
> something like cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/. The temperatures are around
> 57-60 degrees when the laptop is just idling, ie, just the desktop and the
> terminal window open. I install lm_sensors using yum and it installs
> successfully, but there is no noticable reduction in temperature. I have
> faced this same problem using different varities of gnu/linux
> distributions: slackware, lubuntu, mandriva and now centos. By a freak
> chance, i had a chance to run RHEL 5.4 and to my great surprise, the
> temperature at idling was 43, similar to Windows(which came as default). In
> fact, the temperature control by rhel was what made me think of trying
> centos. I tried the lm_sensors configuration on rhel and it was not even
> able to load the correct modules, yet the temperature control was better.
> Now, i am not sure if lmsensors are for detecting temperatures only but
> also for cotrolling temperature.

lm_sensors is indeed for monitoring only. Further, different drivers 
will report different temps so you need to be very careful you are not 
comparing apples with oranges. Even the same driver (e.g, coretemp) can 
report different temps depending if it's an old version in el5 vs a 
newer version in el6. Temperatures are generally relative so monitoring 
is useful to see if the temp goes up or down, but don't necessarily take 
the values as absolute.

> I am also aware that this particular model is notorious for heating
> problems, and there are suggestions for cutting case for better air flow.
> However, i do not want to try this solution, but the temperature control
> by rhel gave me some hope! Posibly i am wrong.
> If anyone has a suggestion, or needs more information, pl. let me know.

Generally newer distro's (and/or kernels) will have better power 
management and thus should allow lower temps. I doubt running a LiveCD 
is the best way to evaluate a distro's power management performance, 
although I could be wrong.