CPU Heat Control

Acoc · Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 9:50 pm Post subject: CPU Heat Control

Hello,

I have a uniwill 258KA0 which has horrible BIOS acpi support and constantly overheats. The only thing I can do with it is run a thermal zone and set the cpu governor. To set the govenor I use cpufreq and it works very well with all types.

What I would like to do is run a daemon that will constantly keep track of /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature and when it reaches a certain temperature (probably 75 degrees C) it will change the governor to userspace and manually lower the frequency of the cpu. Then when the temperature has reached an acceptable temperature (say 60 degrees C) it will switch back to the conservative or ondemand governor.

Is there such a program?

John
_________________
_There were plenty of times in my century when I was gonna give up, but I never did. Never! Hey, are you even listening to me? Oh, I give up._ Futurama

pteppic · l33t Joined: 28 Nov 2005 Posts: 781

Gnomes lm-sensors applet will allow you to execute an arbitary command on 'alarm' state. If you had an SUID root script that pushed the right governor into /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor , then switched it back 10 minutes later that would work. You may even be able to set uppper and lower limits by running the applet twice.

Acoc · Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 10:35 pm Post subject:

Unfortunately, I could never get lm-sensors to detect my hardware. In all fairness I've stopped after seeing that the sensors-detect didn't work, but I should try to look into it a little more. I can say that the /proc/acpi/processor doesn't detect anything and I believe that is where lm-sensors looks, but I could be wrong about that.

I use e17, so there is a module on the desktop that I can set the governor and the frequency through that as a user. I was trying to look at the source to see how it did it, but I couldn't really see much except that it used cpufreq. It also said FIXME: check permissions (can execute) setfreq before trying, so it might be a fluke that it works.

John
_________________
_There were plenty of times in my century when I was gonna give up, but I never did. Never! Hey, are you even listening to me? Oh, I give up._ Futurama

Acoc · Posted: Sun Mar 12, 2006 3:19 am Post subject:

Another thing I was thinking was that if I wanted to play a game or do some encoding I really wouldn't want to change frequency. Is there a way to just prevent the ondemand from reaching it's highest level? For example I have an Mobile Athlon 3000 which can reach 2.0 Ghz. The levels are 800 Mhz, 1.6 GHz, 1.8 Ghz, and 2.0 Ghz. When at 1.8 Ghz I can't overheat, no matter what torture I put it under. So would there be a way of stopping it from going to 2.0 Ghz?

John
_________________
_There were plenty of times in my century when I was gonna give up, but I never did. Never! Hey, are you even listening to me? Oh, I give up._ Futurama

pteppic · l33t Joined: 28 Nov 2005 Posts: 781

/etc/cpufreqd.conf has some rules that you can add to yourself, but I tend to have solved any overheating problems by getting some decent thermal bonding compound, or a bigger heatsink.
Try cpufreqd.sourceforge.net for the rules you want, if not PM me some example outputs from /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature and a copy of all the files in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ and I'll knock something up in python.