Le Wednesday 06 May 2015 à 11:40 +0200, Thibaut Verron a écrit :
While the CPU is not under too much stress, I can get a good 30-45 minutes of worktime before the computer becomes worryingly hot. I don't think that flashing a BIOS requires a lot of computations, and I don't recall it taking too long either, so it'd be a low risk. The consequences are more daunting than the chances of it happening.
Indeed it seems safe to attempt then.
Also according to the logs the shutdown was triggered by a thermal zone critical limit being reached, which means that it was a graceful emergency shutdown initiated by the ACPI thermal driver, not a hardware-triggered CPU power-off. There's no such thing running while no OS is running so I think I was safe flashing the BIOS. Do you have anything logged when the systems shuts itself down?
I just tested it again, there seems to be a message (too fast to read), then it showed a tty prompt for a few seconds before going off. It is the same behavior as when I turn the computer off normally. So, yes, "graceful emergency shutdown".
FWIW I could even see the message after rebooting in the output of journalctl, so it was graceful enough that it could log the message to the disk.
But that doesn't imply that there is no hardware emergency shutdown available... For example, I've also run a memtest (computer still hot), after two minutes it went off without warning. Or is there an ACPI driver in memtest too, but memtest doesn't need to take any care before shutting down?
I very much doubt that memtest86 has any care for ACPI. So there must be indeed a hardware protection triggering, either at the processor level, or at the BIOS level with a SMI and some SMM code. After all, the ACPI-driven shut down is there to prevent the violent hardware one from triggering... Either way, whatever happens in memtest86 will happen when flashing the BIOS, as these are comparable conditions and workloads. The only difference is the duration, of course. Good luck, -- Jean Delvare SUSE L3 Support -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+owner@opensuse.org