Overheating attributed to Freebsd --sysctl variables notavailable--

[C. Ulrich]

On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 21:47, nw1 wrote:
> Mr. Ulrich, I understand your position, however, do you understand mine?  :-)

(Apologies that this reply is a few days late.)

Yes, I understand your position. But I still think you're going at this
from the wrong angle.

Hardware should never overheat unless it is defective or improperly
cooled. Period. Software (even the operating system) simply doesn't
enter into the equation. True, software can manipulate the hardware in
certain ways to make it run cooler or conserve energy during certain
periods, but you simply can't hold the software responsible for actual,
physical hardware failure.

I still say that the best solution is to figure out how to better cool
your system. Buy a bigger heatsink, add more fans to the case, cut holes
in the case to improve airflow, whatever. You could even buy different
hardware with the rationale that the stuff you have is defective by
design because it overheats under normal use and I wouldn't complain.
You can, of course, lobby the kernel maintainers to put those sysctl
variables back into FreeBSD, but chances are they took them out for a
good reason.

I'm not trying to mindlessly defend FreeBSD, either. Even if you were
running Windows 3.1 on the machines, I would still stand by my position.

Good luck.

Charles Ulrich
-- 
http://bityard.net