Can't stand the heat

chaosz911 · 2010-04-22 12:28:13

Hello,

As a new Archlinux user I managed to get it up and running with Openbox as desktop environment. Got everything to work, like mouse, keyboard, ati drivers, wifi thanks to the awesome wiki.
One major problem resides though and that is heat!
The CPU is doing virtually nothing at 0-2% load, but still the laptop becomes really hot and would thermal shutdown! As a sort of workaround I installed cpufreq and have the scaling governor on ondemand which lets both cores run at 1Ghz mostly. This prevents the thermal shutdown, but still the laptop becomes really hot with doing nothing (just a bare openbox desktop).
My hunch is that is has to do with the ATI gfx card and lack of powermanagement of it, but I have no idea of how to proceed from here and if the hunch is correct.
I did read something about xf86-video-ati not supporting powermanagement and fglrx that does support it?
Any help would be much welcomed!

Kind regards,

René

toad · 2010-04-22 13:34:09

What does lm_sensors say? Have you tried VGA? If top says 0-2% CPU load that would make sense. Another option - the radeonhd driver.

Last edited by toad (2010-04-24 15:49:12)

Cdh · 2010-04-22 18:17:34

chaosz911 wrote:

ATI gfx card and lack of powermanagement of it, but I have no idea of how to proceed from here and if the hunch is correct.
I did read something about xf86-video-ati not supporting powermanagement and fglrx that does support it?

Powersave support for xf86-video-ati is coming.
It already exists and works:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 49#p747549 (Post #1734)
But it's very new and is still being tested so you would need kernel 2.6.34 with patches and several packages from git.

fglrx does have powersaving I think but I heard there are problems with hibernation/suspend.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-04-22 12:28:13

Can't stand the heat

#2 2010-04-22 13:34:09

Re: Can't stand the heat

#3 2010-04-22 18:17:34

Re: Can't stand the heat

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