Fan+heat troubles on MacBook Pro

[christoffer.buchholz at gmail.com]

Thank you for your quick reply!
To answer you questions...

1) uname -a reads "Linux gomet 2.6.35.6-48.fc14.x86_64" - I have also tried
with the kernel from the bleeding edge fedora 15 repo, but that didnt change
much if anything at all.

2) According to apple documentation, my processor is a "2.53GHz Intel Core 2
Duo processor with 3MB on-chip shared L2 cache running 1:1 with processor
speed" and has a "1066MHz frontside bus" <- I guess that is the rated clock
frequency.

3) 'cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor' reads
"ondemand"

4) 'cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq' reads
"798000" and it does that even when i shut down all apps running, so it
seems its actually not so ondemand

5) I'm not very technical, so but here's some of the stuff, which I guess is
the important part, from powertop. It doesnt really change more than a few
numbers up and down, so it should be good: http://fpaste.org/7G9b/

6) The output from /proc/interrupts doesnt seem to change that much. You can
see the output from '/proc/interrupts; sleep 0.5s; cat /proc/interrupts'
here http://fpaste.org/QXVO/

I hope this makes things clearer for you.


On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 11:59 PM, Steven Noonan <steven at uplinklabs.net>wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 1:36 PM, christoffer.buchholz at gmail.com
> <christoffer.buchholz at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi guys,
> >
> > I own a MacBook Pro which I bought brand new in January 2010. I have
> tried
> > running Fedora 14 (and 13) on it, but I am having some troubles.
> Especially,
> > the fan is not functioning properly which leads to very hot temperatures
> > nearing 70 degrees celcius when I am not doing more than running irssi in
> a
> > terminal.
> >
> > I having been digging around, and loading the applesmc and coretemp
> modules
> > scored a few degrees. Also running fedora at runlevel 3 didnt do much
> > difference, so I guess the problem is not X but the Linux kernel.
> > FYI, I am using the nouveau driver and not the proprietary nvidia driver.
> I
> > tried the nvidia driver, but it didnt do any difference, so I went with
> the
> > nouveau one.
> > I have tried with powertop and enabling its suggestions, but it didnt
> help.
> >
> > I and writing this mail in hope to get some tips back with things I could
> > try, and also to see if this is something that is worth filing a bug on,
> or
> > if the issue is somewhere else.
> >
>
> Hi Chris,
>
> I had this kind of trouble a couple years ago with a mid 2007 MacBook
> Pro, and it ended up being a buggy cpufreq driver which refused to
> scale down. I also had similar heating issues when a buggy atheros
> driver caused an interrupt storm, which also prevented cpufreq from
> doing its job (though it caused more obvious symptoms as well).
>
> Chances are, there's something going on in kernel space that shouldn't
> be happening. So you're probably on the right track by checking
> PowerTOP. Would be helpful to know a bit more though.
>
> - What kernel are you running?
> - What CPU do you have, and what's its rated clock frequency?
> - Can you do 'cat
> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor' to find out
> what cpufreqy scaling governor your machine is using? If it's
> 'performance', your CPU won't ever scale down to lower frequencies to
> save heat/power.
> - Can you do 'cat
> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq' a few times
> while the machine is idle, and see if it ever scales down?
> - What does PowerTOP say? You mention checking it, but didn't say
> anything about what it reported.
> - It's a long shot, but can you check if anything listed in
> /proc/interrupts is getting an inordinate number of interrupts per
> second? To find out, you may have to do something like 'cat
> /proc/interrupts; sleep 0.5s; cat /proc/interrupts' and see if
> anything has changed dramatically.
>
> Steven
>