On Tue, 5 May 2015 23:02:33 +0200, Thibaut Verron wrote:
2015-05-05 22:08 GMT+02:00 Jean Delvare
: * If the previous advice doesn't help, it might be worth re-flashing the BIOS even if no new version is available. If the BIOS code was somehow corrupted, that would restore it.
I could try that, but I'm wary of taking this step: flashing a bios with a computer that may shutdown because of critical temperature sounds a bit dangerous. The first time I got issues of this kind, I did update the bios (with the laptop directly on an indoor air conditioner, I could do that because it was July), and it did not help. But since nothing seems to be reproducible here, I might as well try again now...
It happens that I am having similar trouble with an old laptop of mine at the moment, so I know how you feel. The laptop is shutting down when my daughter plays Minecraft on it. The BIOS version was old and known broken so I decided to attempt to update it. I don't know yet if it helped. That being said my case was probably less critical than yours, as the problem would only happen under heavy load. 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? If you give it a try, there are a few tricks: flash the BIOS after the machine has been off for a long time, do it in the morning when the ambient temperature is the lowest, in the coldest room, with the windows open (assuming it is colder outside.)
(...) But is it possible that manual control be broken without affecting automatic control? I guess that's asking whether the kernel has a lower-level access to the fan controls than what's exposed in the /sys filesystem?
Depends on what is broken exactly. If the fan control output circuitry is dead, this will affect both the manual and the automatic modes. The BIOS or some user-space daemon will try to set the fan speed to the desired value but the fan will not react to the command. That can't be fixed. If the BIOS code is broken, it will definitely affect the automatic mode, but it could also affect the manual mode, because in your case everything goes through an intermediate EC interface, including switching from automatic to manual mode and setting the speed manually. If the BIOS code is dead then even that can fail. Broken manual control with working automatic control would only happen if the driver code is wrong and sends the wrong commands to the EC in manual mode. Unfortunately for laptop-specific kernel modules we generally don't get much help from vendors, so it's always best-effort and we can't guarantee it will work perfectly all the time.
(...) As a closing note, I don't know how old your model is, but it should be noted that low-priced consumer hardware showing issues after 4-5 years is nothing out of the ordinary. This may not be what's happening here... but it may as well be "just" that.
That's right. But given that there was similar issues at age 1 (just past warranty expiration... a critical point in a computer's lifetime, I know), I would find it strange if this was a new issue.
I agree, it smells like the same issue you had back then resurfaced. Which isn't entirely surprising, BTW, as apparently you don't know how you solved the problem back then. Problems which solve themselves magically have a tendency to reappear in the same way.
Of course, it is still possible that the problems I had 3 and 2 years ago were not merely software issues, but symptoms of a hardware failure that was (temporarily) mitigated with software tweaks.
Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. If nobody has any other short-term suggestion, I'll try redownloading and flashing the bios indeed.
-- 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