Re: [Libreboot] X60 constantly overheating and shutting down.

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Tue, 31 May 2016 11:08:02 +1000
Ben Sturmfels <address@hidden> wrote:

> For what it's worth, I had a similar issue with my Libreboot X60.
> While it is possible to mitigate by turning the fan way up, it's
> noisy, inconvenient and uses more power. I wrote about that here:
> 
> https://stumbles.id.au/controlling-fan-speed-on-thinkpad-x60.html
Increasing the fan speed helps keeping the temperature low, however
it's not the only option to prevent the machine from shutting itself
down.

I strongly suspect that something also shuts down the computer
completely when it's too hot to prevent the battery from reaching
problematic temperatures. Removing the battery should prevent that.
In that case you might need to remove the battery (and optionally put it
back in again) to be able to power on again the computer.

Then you have several ways you can impact the CPU temperature:
- Controlling the fan speed. The link above is deprecated, instead you
  can use /sys/class/hwmon. It's documented in the kernel sources
  documentation in Documentation/laptops/thinkpad-acpi.txt
  The fan can be set to automatic, manual (from 0 to 255), or to
  maximum speed (it will go faster than with 255).
  You might need to modprobe thinkpad_acpi with fan_control=1 to be
  able to use that.
- Controlling the CPU clock frequency, you can cap it to a fixed speed.
  The cpupower software in parabola permits that.
- Allowing the inactive CPU cores to go in C3 state (sleep) when not
  used.
- Controlling various other power management features of the machine,
  such as the WiFi power savings.

I probably forgot many other ways. If you suspect something related to
libreboot you could compare with the BIOS.

Note that GNU/Linux and other OS tend to pick, by default, what power
management settings the BIOS advise them to use.
In GNU/Linux, in many cases, it's possible to override that.

Denis.

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