KDE 4.14 heating up my lap(top)

[O. Sinclair]

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On 23/08/2014 01:36, Myriam Schweingruber wrote:
> Hi Sinclair,
> 
> 
> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 5:20 PM, O. Sinclair <o.sinclair at gmail.com 
> <mailto:o.sinclair at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
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> 
> Hi,
> 
> I installed 4.14 KDE on my 14.04 laptop and find that the cooling
> fan is constantly running and the cpu-heat reports an extra 4C or
> so constantly.
> 
> Starting any webbrowser from Rekonq via Qupzilla to Firefox I see
> TOP reporting that they chew from 15% CPU up to over 100.. with 1
> tab open.
> 
> This was not happening in 4.13.3 - anyone seeing this and have an
> idea of why and what to do?
> 
> 
> What laptop is it? Some brands have more problems than others, and
> it could simply be a kernel issue. Did you try running a previous
> kernel to check if you can narrow the problem down? Since there have been a few
> kernel upgrades lately that could also be an issue, not just the 4.13.3
> release. 
> Also, talking about the degrees: what range do you talk about? I have
> permanently the heat going over 70°C when using a browser on a Lenovo
> X220, apparently this is unavoidable :(
> 
In my case it is HP Pavilion with the dreaded hybrid intel/AMD gpu
combo. For unknown reasons the proprietary drivers stopped working
around 11.10 even though they are supposed to be supported for this combo.

What I normally do is to use vgaswitcheroo to shut down the AMD GPU as I
don't game, watch movies and whatever on my laptop. This stopped working
with 14.04 as the free Radeon driver is now so improved that if I run on
battery the GPU is turned off.

That was a somewhat lengthy explanation as to why I have more than one
kernel installed and normally run on 3.12.x as that was the last kernel
where I can get vgaswitcheroo to kill off the AMD GPU at boot.

The "any browser eats CPU in 4.14" is consistent in kernel 3.12, 3.13
and 3.17 as far as I can see.

Somehow it seems to be related to plasmadesktop or kwin processes as
these also shoot up when I launch a browser.

Otherwise my hardware is 2nd gen Intel i5 CPU, 4gb RAM and an ordinary HDD
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