Does your Laptop Overheat? What do You do About It?

An Anonymous Coward writes:

I run FreeBSD on a Thinkpad X61.

I like the X61 because it has a physically small footprint. Also because I was able to pick up several of them at a good price, so that, with regular backups, my laptop, as well as the data upon it, are mirrored.

However, for several years I have noticed that the X61 overheats and shuts down when I push it too hard. Like, when I am building a new laptop, and running X, and multitasking, and compiling a kernel, and using the ports collection to build things from source, night and day, for three or four days. Somewhere in there it starts warming up and it just accumulates heat faster than it can get rid of the heat, until it shuts down.

I'm kind of disappointed. You would think they would anticipate that in the design.

FreeBSD has some registers in the kernel that can be monitored, much as Linux offers via /proc, to see what the actual temperature is on a per-core basis. I wrote a script and ported it from version to version of FreeBSD to monitor that. I began using powerd(8). That seemed to fix the problem; but at the cost of throttling the CPU to about 75% of its rated capacity.

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