Fedora 20 freezes at the login screen. System Temperature over limit.

[Russell Miller]

On Apr 19, 2014, at 7:51 PM, Sudhir Khanger <sudhir at sudhirkhanger.com> wrote:

> I am having a really terrible experience with Fedora 20 KDE on Thinkpad 420i.
> 
> I installed Fedora 20 KDE on Thinkpad 420i, upgraded it to the latest and system freezes at the login screen. System temperature goes over limit either burning the system or shutting it down. Load average goes as high as 10. Fedora 20 is shipped with kernel 3.11.10 and I can confirm that I faced the problem on 3.13.8, 3.13.9 and 3.13.10 is a hit and miss.
> 
> I have filed a bug but it hasn't cracked a noise at Redhat Bugzilla. No response either from KDE Mailing list here and this is my last resort before I might have to forcibly switch to a more stable distro like Kubuntu (and that would be really sad).

Though there may be a kernel issue, this sounds like it might actually be a hardware problem.  Have you checked that your fan is functioning properly?  I had a Lenovo
IdeaPad (still have it, actually, it runs Ubuntu) whose fan gave up the ghost.  $40 later and a few minutes and it was good as new.

The kernel can cause overtemperature, but the temperature/fan is usually controlled in the BIOS.  Since you mention that it works when you turn off the display manager..
that would make sense since on a laptop the processor actually creates less heat than the graphics chip sometimes.

You might try it with different distributions just to rule out a hardware issue.

--Russell