On 8/21/20 9:57 AM, jdd@dodin.org wrote:
Hello,
On my main laptop, I find the cpu is getting hot very fast
My desk is climatized, temperature is not cold but not hot either (around 27°C)
at rest the cpu temp is around 60°
a simple copy from a disk to an other makes it go up to 85°C, and dmesg gives red warning cpu speed is reduced.
[ 661.011117] CPU2: Core temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1) [ 661.011118] CPU3: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1) [
Technical term: "Dust Bunnies", contributing factors include large desktop environment demands on the CPU. Two separate issues: (1) if there is any dust build-up in the cooling paths within your laptop, you will see temp spikes under any load. The cure is to clean them out (BUT YOU MUST TAKE CARE NOT TO OVERSPEED YOUR FANS IN THE PROCESS) If you can't open your laptop (most cannot), then your best friend is a shop-vac (with a brush attachment to brush over the screens to help pull the dust bunnies through the small screen holes). BEFORE you just take the shop-vac crevice nozzle to the openings in your laptop - find out where the fan is (sometimes you can see it right behind one of the cooling screens) You want to "peg-the-fan" to prevent it from spinning. (you hit it with the shop vac and you can easily send it spinning 10X its limit and potentially cause it to fly apart) so use a thumb-tack or small piece of wire (20 ga. or so) to slip though the screen and secure the fan blade from moving) Then you can shop-vac with the crevice tool to your hearts content and see all the dead rats pile up against the cooling screens on the inside (use small circular motions with the brush attachment to pull the cruft through the screen a few bits at a time) If you can't peg-the-fan, then the shop vac is still your friend, but you can't just put the nozzle over the screen. Instead use the brush attachment and wand it over the cooling screen in short sweeps to prevent putting the full force of the vacuum through the cooling path. If you have no brush attachment, then you can spread your fingers over the end of your vacuum hose to keep the nozzle directly off the cooling screen and do the same thing (without a brush attachment, you will need a brush of some kind, old toothbrush, scrub brush with fine bristles to help pull the dust bunnies through the screen) (2) Plasma and Gnome -- they are CPU hogs no matter how you slice it. I just did my bi-monthly update of Plasma from Git (kde app versions 20.04) and my laptop sounded like an airplane. Plasma would settle down and idle just fine with no inputs, but as soon as you started to do anything (mouse movements, etc.., simple editors kwrite, kate, or even konsole) the temps would spike and the fans would switch to take-off speed (with an i7 and 8G of RAM) So even clean, with a heavy desktop, laptops are going to struggle that is just a fact. Laptops lack by an order of magnitude the cooling capacity of desktop computers (a desktop CPU cooler is generally 2-3 times a thick as a laptop to begin with unless it is liquid cooled and then we are in a whole different area of cooling not available to laptops anyway) ======== So those are the two things and approaches I know to help with CPU heat problems. The dust-bunnie issues should be an every couple of month maintenance thing anyway (though I'm human too and don't always get a round to it). The desktop environment issue is just how much CPU the varying desktops demand. Plasma and Gnome have been designed to do all that can be done to utilize the CPU to provide all the niceties that the desktops provide. Which is fine for desktops with all the cooling in the world, but is horrible for laptops that are a couple of years old. Yes, you can tediously pick through the default settings and try and turn unnecessary processes off -- but that gets beyond the ability of many users (do I need this process, or can I turn it off?) I turn off everything non-necessary for my desktop, and even then Plasma smokes the fans on my 5 year old laptop. So unless you need desktop effects, fading windows, fonts that auto-size for your windows, etc... you may want to consider a different desktop. I run KDE3 for that purpose. I also keep Fluxbox and I3 installed. All of which can load on top of Linux and run happily in less than 200M of memory. XFCE and LxQt are also good lightweight desktop environments that are currently supported. I haven't messed with Deepin, Mate or Cinnamon, etc.. so I can't comment on there CPU demand, but you need to size your desktop to what your hardware can handle. So longer than I initially intended, but hopefully it provides some options -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org