The Linux kernel could make idle calls to help reduce the power consumption of the processor. This feature is also BIOS dependent which in your case is enabled. You have to configure the Power Management Support before compiling a new kernel to enable the idle call feature. make menuconfig --> goto "Generel setup" --> goto "Power management support" and enable that feature. Some if not all AMD motherboard vendors disallowed the idling feature because on the old Athlon processors going up to 1.4 GHz, the systems would become unstable, or cracking noise would come out of the sound cards. I have both Abit and Asus motherboards which no longer support cpu idle calls after recent BIOS upgrades. Some would also argue that rapid rise and fall of the cpu temperature could cause damage. I don't know if that is true because we are only talking about a maximum difference of 10 degrees Celsius. I don't know if any one of the above is the reason why your 8.2 Suse kernel doesn't support it, but it is possible. Try booting with your old kernel that came with Suse 8.1 and see what happens. If cpu idling works in you Linux kernel, you should see a process running with the name kidle, or something similar, and that process would be consuming most of the cpu time. At least, that's how it was the last time the idling feature worked on my linux box. Sinan Sinanian --- Clayton Cornell <c.cornell@chello.nl> wrote:
I've noticed something odd with my computer since I've installed SuSE8.2. The idle operating temperature is about 10C higher than normal, and CPU load is almost zero (sitting idle).
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