After reading through a slew of comments on a Launchpad bug report, I’m at least a step closer to solving the issue of my CPU temperature overheating.
First off, the bug only seems to happen on Ubuntu. I’m downloading a DVD image of Fedora Core 6 as I type this. I’d hate to move away from Ubuntu, but this bug is very serious, and greatly impacts the usability of my computer.
However, there may be a way to solve this without switching distros. I’ve added the following two lines to /etc/rc.local:
/etc/init.d/powernowd stop
sh -c ‘echo -n ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor’
Note, those are two lines, even if WordPress wraps the words.
After running those two command manually, my CPU seems to be in much better shape. The CPU still heats up, but as it approaches a dangerous temperature, it clocks down for a few seconds to allow itself to cool off, then clocks back up if needed. This is much better than my previous solution that locked the CPU to 600MHz whenever the temperature passed 90° C.
In no way to I guarantee this solution. It might help, it might make things worse, so don’t blame me if something breaks.
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