Fan+heat troubles on MacBook Pro

[christoffer.buchholz at gmail.com]

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 5:21 PM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> 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.

Can you say if and when power management for nvidia GPUs will come? Is
the work already started, and is it something I can try out?


On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 5:22 PM, Steven Noonan <steven at uplinklabs.net> wrote:
> Chris, you could try to test and see if applesmc is the cause. Try
> preventing applesmc from loading (add 'blacklist applesmc' to
> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf), and see if your fans still stay at
> 2000 RPM under CPU-heavy workloads. Of course, you'll have to just
> listen to find out if the fans spin up instead of checking sysfs, but
> this will at least help debug the situation.

I tried this, and it didnt seem to me, that the fans went any higher
than the 2000 RPM that applesmc also provides. To be fair, I didn't
let my laptop become hotter than what I guessed was around +75°C
because I dont wanna hurt my hardware.


On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 5:37 PM, Henrik Rydberg <rydberg at euromail.se> wrote:
> The single most important thing is to make sure the fanX_manual zero for the
> built-in SMC to work. Otherwise, you really need something like macfanctld.
>
> Attached script has been used before to determine the SMC model and the level of
> severity of the heat problem. FWIW, the latest Macbook Airs run really cool, so
> things are getting a lot better.
>
> The web is dense with references to ubuntu on macs, and you will find more
> information there.

fan1_manual (my laptop only has one fan) does indeed read "0", so that
should be fine. Running the script, it outputs stuff like that the
laptop was built around 2009 and 2010, and that it doesnt have any
(known) overheat protection. Full output is here:
http://fpaste.org/hZW9/


Sincerely,
Chris Buchholz