[Bug 1163573] Re: Ubuntu 12.10 overheats my laptop until it shutdowns without notice

[Phillip Susi]

Unless you have setup fancontrol ( which it seems you have not ) then
lm-sensors nor any other component in Ubuntu is in control of your fans.
The hardware controls them, and you said they do speed up so it sounds
like that hardware control is working properly.  You may be able to run
the sensors-detect script to get lm-sensors to be able to correctly
report the fan speed to verify this.  In any event, the CPU
automatically throttles its speed to prevent overheating, but this
should only happen in dire circumstances.  Your logs indicate this has
been happening, yet it still overheats.  According to Intel's design
documents, this points to either a catastrophic failure of the cooling
system ( heatsink has come loose ) or its design limits are well under
what the cpu requires.  Either way, overheating requires a hardware
defect.

It may be that the hardware simply does not respond to temperature rise
fast enough ( due to HP design error ), in which case you may be able to
work around the defect by changing bios options to always run the fan at
full speed, or to be more aggressive in its use of the fan.
Alternatively, if sensors-detect recognizes your fan controller hardware
and a proper module can be loaded to manipulate it, you could then force
full speed fan mode.

You might also check your logs for a line like this:

CPU0: Thermal monitoring enabled (TM1)

The BIOS has the option to enable TM1 or the much better TM2 mode.  If
your system is using TM1 then that could be a contributing factor that
you would need to report to HP so that they may fix their bios to use
the better TM2 mode.


** Changed in: lm-sensors (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Invalid

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Title:
  Ubuntu 12.10 overheats my laptop until it shutdowns without notice

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