Arch Linux

foobar42

Member

Registered: 2011-03-28

Posts: 12

[SOLVED] CPU temperature always over 60°C and fan speed at 100%

Today I installed arch linux on a Sandy Bridge laptop.

I installed cpupower which controlls the cpu frequency very good with the cpufreq_ondemand govenor. But the temperature remains over 62°C for the physical CPU. Powertop tells me that the GPU (HD3000) is at 100% all the time, which makes sense as the CPU cores have a temperature of about 50°C each. It does not help to use i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 as a boot parameter (the values 2 and 3 do nothing either); RC6 is not used at any time.

Does anyone know why RC6 is not used? Maybe a conflict between two modules which prevent the GPU from entering low-power states?

Thanks in advance.

Last edited by foobar42 (2012-12-02 21:58:57)

Hiato

Member

Registered: 2009-01-21

Posts: 76

Re: [SOLVED] CPU temperature always over 60°C and fan speed at 100%

foobar42, you've been hit by the power regression issue in the newer kernel versions (3.6.x IIRC). A quick search about the forums will reveal a lot of information about this issue, including bug reports here and upstream and plenty of solutions. TL;DS = downgrade to an earlier kernel version, somewhere around 3.4.x or 3.5.x depending on the specifics of your laptop.

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foobar42

Member

Registered: 2011-03-28

Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED] CPU temperature always over 60°C and fan speed at 100%

And I thought I had searched for everything regarding Sandy Bridge. Thanks a lot.