Very serious cooling issues CURRENT/STABLE

[Martin]

Am Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:54:35 -0500
schrieb Nathan Lay <nslay at comcast.net>:

> Hi list(s)
> Early in the year I noticed CURRENT failed to cool my frankenstein 
> Thinkpad T40 (built from T40/40p parts) under load.  The system would 
> shut down from critically high temperatures while building a port.  I 
> did nothing special with ACPI.  I thought nothing of it since, after 
> all, I rebuilt a broken T40 from T40p parts.  Today, however, I
> noticed that a very recent STABLE build failed to keep my T43 cool
> while building ports.  It reached temperatures of 97, 98, 99C.

Hallo Nathan,

I can confirm this on a T60p. My notebooks shuts down since I use 7.0
at 101°C. I have written a script that throttles the CPU if it gets
above 75°C. I have to use it when I'm building world or ports.

Btw, I have reported the problem here a some time ago [1]. I have
received some feedback that IBM/Lenovo uses wrong cooling strategy
placing the CPU and the VGA under one single cooled surface and using
too much thermal grease.

On the other hand I have also emphasized that the fan should be able to
have about 800rpm more at the temperature of 80°C, but this has been
ignored so far. This is why I have never had any problems running "the
other common operating systems" and I have put them under heavy load.
They don't exceed 85°C.

> It
> used to reach a max temperature of 80C while building a port (idling
> temperature is ~ 45C).  It behaved normally from 5.3 all the way
> through 7.0.  To remedy both issues, I had to underclock the
> processor (via dev.cpu) and force the fan to its highest (I'm running
> 533MHz shy of the processor's full potential, with a fan level of 7
> to keep the temperature at ~75C).

I have one further hint for you. The VGA is running very hot on
FreeBSD (~75°C when idle), because it is not able to throttle the GPU
and its voltage. Maybe you've had a working setup for your GPU before
and you even did not notice? Did you change your Xorg drivers?

> I've always suspected FreeBSD's
> ACPI didn't work properly on Thinkpad T series laptops (I have T40,
> T41, T42 and T43) as it could never fully use the fan (Windows XP can
> rev the fan far higher than acpi_ibm's level 7).  Between STABLE and
> CURRENT...something seems very wrong.  These systems never had
> cooling issues with FreeBSD before.

The fan is running definitely too slow. On my system, too.

Thanks,
Martin


References:
[1]
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-June/042812.html