Re: [gentoo-user] Dell Precision Workstation Overheating

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 9:22 PM, R0b0t1 <r030t1@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Is there a way to at least mimic the conservative CPU usage that
> Windows exhibits?
>

I'll set aside the obvious hardware issues and touch on workarounds.
I had an old system that had some heating issues (my guess is due to
heatsink seating or something like that), and I used cpufreqd at the
time.  This is a daemon that polls CPU temp (among other things) and
can be set to change the frequency policy of the kernel based on
thresholds.  I had it set to force the kernel into a powersave
governor when the temp exceeded a threshold.  The resulting behavior
was that the clock speed would cycle between min/max and maintain the
temp at the threshold when the system was under a sustained load.
However, for short bursts of activity the CPU was unconstrained.

That software is obsolete today and was removed from the Gentoo repos
a while ago.

I'd take a look at thermald or ncpufreqd in the repo as starting
points.  The docs I googled on thermald suggest that it might do the
job with zero config tweaks.

Without using any software you could also just directly set the
frequency limits in the kernel (accessible somewhere in the bowels of
/proc or /sys).  However, that is going to cause a performance hit
even for short demands that the heatsink can handle.

Ultimately though you're going to be better off if you can actually
fix the thermal issues themselves.

-- 
Rich