Re: Lenny overheating, preventing installation
Dne sobota 11 april 2009 ob 15:22:38 je Douglas A. Tutty napisal(a):
> On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 02:26:30PM +0200, Aleksa ??u??uli?? wrote:
> > The laptop is less than a year old and still in warranty. It has never
> > been used in dusty or dirty places. And this overheating only happens
> > with Debian (installing OpenSuSE or Mandriva or Ubuntu or Fedora works a
> > breeze). The only other instance it does happen is when my current
> > OpenSuSE system freezes (stops responding), ramping up the CPU to 100%
> > usage: if I don't switch to a virtual terminal and reboot within, say, 10
> > minutes, the laptop will shut itself off from overheating. Hence my
> > assumption that the machine simply is not DESIGNED to work at full
> > throttle (100% CPU usage) for any length of time. But I may be wrong, of
> > course.
> >
> > As a sidenote: I've found a thread on internet a while ago stating that
> > you may risk overheating and even frying a laptop if you try installing
> > Windows98 as a virtual machine, since Windows98 does not support the CPU
> > "idle" instruction. I assume something vaguely similar may be going on
> > here. Modern laptops with fairly powerful CPUs apparently rely on certain
> > subsystems of the OS to effectively prevent overheating. If some of those
> > subsystems don't work as expected, overheating will occur. I find it hard
> > to believe there aren't more laptop users with this sort of problems...
>
> So they install a powerful CPU for the marketers to get you to drool
> over, then don't provide the necessary cooling so that when you
> actualluy _use_ the CPU power, the unit fails.
>
> I'd call it a design flaw and return the unit.
>
> Doug.
I agree ... to a point. Namely, I've never managed to overheat the unit by
just _using_ the CPU. It exclusively happens:
1) during a Debian Lenny installation
2) during a certain type of system lock-up which forces both the CPU frequency
and its usage to go to 100%.
I'd compare (if I may) the situation with a car having, say, a range of 0 to
7000 RPM, of which only 2000 to 5000 is actually the "working range". Now,
forcing the car in a very low gear and running it at a constant 7000 RPM, how
many minutes until the engine overheats? And, more importantly: how _stupid_
should one be to actually try doing this at home? It's, in my opinion, what's
happening here: some runaway process or OS flaw simply ramps up the CPU to a
regime that wasn't intended to be used for a prolonged time in the first
place. In normal usage, leaving a CPU running at 100% usage is a rare
occurence (I'm not talking about CPU frequency here, I'm talking about CPU
usage - 100% meaning no idle cycles whatsoever over several minutes or even
hours!).
Reply to: