Laptop fans don't stop anymore

[Mark Roach]

On 3/7/2006, "Miles Lane" <miles.lane at gmail.com> wrote:

>On 3/7/06, Carl Karsten <carl at personnelware.com> wrote:
>> Mark Roach wrote:
>> > I'm running dapper, and I've noticed lately that my laptop no longer
>> > ever gets quiet. Sleep mode has never worked on this system, but it used
>> > to be that if I wasn't running anything cpu intensive, and I closed the
>> > lid, eventually the fans would shut down, and the system would stay
>> > cool. Now it is always hot, and the fans are always running.
>> >
>> > According to the CPU scaling monitor, the CPU is getting scaled down to
>> > the 530 Mhz (the lowest). I don't think my hard drive is spinning down
>> > though. I used to run noflushd to make that happen, but it conflicts
>> > with the new laptop-mode stuff. I've got all my partitions mounted with
>> > "noatime" this used to work. Any suggestions?
>> >
>>
>> Something doesn't make sense: Box is hot, fans are running, and you want the
>> fans to... stop?

Cute, but I never said I want the system to both stay hot and stop
blowing air.

>> I am guessing the real problem is the unit is just slowing down, but not going
>> to sleep.

I don't want it to go to sleep. Sleep has never worked on this laptop.

>Run "top" to see which process is chewing up your CPU cycles (my bet
>is that it is gam_server, which seems to have a habit of doing this).

Thanks for the suggestion, but there are no processes using the CPU
heavily. If there were, the system wouldn't step down the CPU.


So, to recap: The system is running hot (hence the fans), the CPU is not
being utilized heavily (it stays at about 99% idle), the drive does not
appear to be going to sleep (according to hdparm -C /dev/hda, the state
is active/idle).

I think I may have to enable /proc/sys/vm/block_dump and poke at this a
little deeper, but I thought someone might have experienced this same
issue.

Thanks,

Mark