Fan+heat troubles on MacBook Pro

[Matthew Garrett]

On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 10:36:33PM +0100, christoffer.buchholz at gmail.com wrote:

> 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.

There's two things that are at play here. The first is that we don't 
implement power management for nvidia GPUs yet, so your GPU is busy 
generating piles of heat all the time. The other is that Apple don't use 
any kind of standard thermal control interface. We can't control their 
fans through ACPI. We can influence their fan behaviour through the SMC 
interface, but we have no idea what the correct OS interaction behaviour 
is.

This leaves two real options. First, if you have Apple hardware, run OS 
X. Alternatively, I need to spend some quality time with recent Apples 
owned by people who don't mind if I melt them.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org