Laptop overheating with F 16

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2011-09-12 at 09:15 -0800, Erinn Looney-Triggs wrote:
> Since moving to Fedora 16 my laptop has been constantly overheating. In
> fact with the tracker-store taking up so much CPU it creates a perfect
> storm and the system will sometimes shut itself off because of the high
> heat in the CPU.
> 
> >From the logs:
> [ 2718.556684] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: MCP limit exceeded: Avg temp
> 9497, limit 9000
> [ 2778.415413] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: MCP limit exceeded: Avg temp
> 9700, limit 9000
> [ 2783.402899] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: MCP limit exceeded: Avg temp
> 9049, limit 9000
> 
> As well as:
> Sep 11 22:02:31 localhost kernel: [  812.799835] CPU2: Core temperature
> above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 639)
> Sep 11 22:02:31 localhost kernel: [  812.799870] CPU3: Core temperature
> above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 638)
> 
> Smolt profile:
> http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_89da1bce-aee0-447a-b859-06a44111f08b
> 
> I don't really know where to begin on this, I figure blame the kernel
> :). Is anyone else experiencing this issue? Any tips for digging out the
> root cause on this?

One, I'd blame your laptop manufacturer, as any hardware which can't
cope with being run at full capacity for a reasonable period is badly
designed hardware. But that's not going to get you very far. =) (to
mitigate, you can get one of those cooling pads for laptops - they look
dumb, but they actually work. I had a similar laptop once that would
overheat-protect-shutdown when building kernels; a cooling pad solved
that problem. Or you can just try and clean out the
externally-accessible heatsinks a bit, that can help.)

Tracker shouldn't eat 100% cpu time for really extended periods, so if
it's doing this for more than, say, an hour, that may well be a bug in
tracker.

You might also want to check if lldpad is installed, and if so, remove
it or upgrade it to fix
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=701943 , which could be
contributing to the problem (the update is linked in the bug).
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net