Arch Linux

geniuz

Member

Registered: 2010-04-10

Posts: 127

Macbook gets hot

Hi all,

I've been running Arch64 on my Macbook 4.1 for quite some time now and I haven't had any real issues. Battery life is reasonable (up to about 4 hours) and for the rest everything works. However there is one issue that has been bugging me, namely temperature. While on Arch, my laptop gets much hotter than on OSX. Furthermore, most heat seems to be produced on the top left side of the machine, thus I don't think this is a battery problem.

I have cpufreq installed and both of the CPU cores are scaled on-demand. Also conky doesn't show any heavy CPU usage (typically between 0-10%). To have a look at the temperatures I have installed lm-sensors which shows both cores are at around 50 degrees celsius. To me this doesn't seem too hot...but still my laptop feels very warm. Is anybody else experiencing this problem on Macs?

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,354

Re: Macbook gets hot

Are you using compiz or some other GC-hungry app?

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Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
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Allan

Pacman

From: Brisbane, AU

Registered: 2007-06-09

Posts: 11,384

Website

Re: Macbook gets hot

Automatic fan control does not actually work on my MacBook Pro 5.5.    Does the fan changes speeds at all on your system?

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geniuz

Member

Registered: 2010-04-10

Posts: 127

Re: Macbook gets hot

Yes sorry I forgot to mention, I'm running a lightweight WM (Musca) without any compositing..so that shouldn't be the problem. Also I don't know if there is any way to check the actual fan speeds, but I do know that I can hear my fan speed up from time to time (usually during some heavy duty) so I presume this works. Isn't the applesmc kernel module responsible for fan control? When I issue:

dmesg | grep "applesmc"

It shows one fan is recognized so I assume fan control should work right?