[CentOS] Overheating on laptop as compared to RHEL

Wed Oct 16 16:46:20 UTC 2013
Krishnan V <v.srikrishnan at gmail.com>

Hello,
I just thought I would mention my efforts in this issue of overheating.
I looked searched for the appropriate drivers, and the latest from AMD
Catalyst 13.1 has some issues installing on Centos6.4 because of some X
issues. Actually, the driver actually issues a warning about not finding
some version of version.h in linux kernel. If i do a force install, X
server crashes with some error message
"Failed to load /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so:
/usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so: undefined symbol:
noXFree86DRIExtension"
After a bit of search, from what i understood, there is compatibility
problem somewhere in X and this driver. The joy is that i may have to
downgrade to 6.3; i am not sure it will work even then,
then i install cpufreq tools, and set the governor to "conservative". then
i also pass acpi_osi=Linux in grub.conf.  All this does not seem to help
much, as the steady temperature from lm_sensors is

acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:       +59.0°C  (crit = +90.0°C)
temp2:       +59.0°C  (crit = +90.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0:      +55.0°C  (high = +90.0°C, crit = +90.0°C)
Core 1:      +55.0°C  (high = +90.0°C, crit = +90.0°C)

Sigh.
I tried looking around for tools to measure gpu temperature, but apart from
proprietary driver, which i am unable to install, there seems to be nothing.
I also tried pwmcontrol, but apparently there is no pwm controller on the
laptop.
Any other suggestions, most welcome.
Thanks!
krishnan




On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 6:28 PM, Krishnan V <v.srikrishnan at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 9:26 PM, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg <
> Nicolas.Thierry-Mieg at imag.fr> wrote:
>
>> Ned Slider wrote:
>> > 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.
>>
>> it may also depend on your GPU and graphics driver. Do you have a
>> discrete GPU in your laptop? If yes, the proprietary driver may help by
>> underclocking the GPU when it doesn't impact performance.
>>
> Yes, I have a separate graphics card. It is ATI Radeon.
>
>>
>> For example if you have an nvidia GPU, installing the correct nvidia
>> driver will do this if your card supports it.
>> Set up elrepo and install nvidia-detect, it will tell you which driver
>> to install.
>> http://elrepo.org/tiki/nvidia-detect
>> Then install it, and run nvidia-settings to see the Powermizer options.
>>
> I will try for ATI Radeon and try this. Thank you.
>
>
>> _______________________________________________
>> CentOS mailing list
>> CentOS at centos.org
>> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>>
>
>