[kwlug-disc] Thermal issue with Ubuntu LTS 20.04

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 8:10 PM Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have an older laptop with a bad display that I use for transcoding the
> videos that the cheap PVR records from an antenna.
> The laptop had 18.04 on it and worked fine.
> When I upgraded to 20.04, while transcoding, it shutdown on its own, and
> upon rebooting, the BIOS had a notice saying it shutdown due to
> overheating.
>
> Doing some searching, it turns out there is a bug in thermald. So I
> uninstalled thermald, and transcoding completed without issues.
>
> However, the range where the kernel throttles the CPU is too high for my
> liking (95C to 105C).
>
> Is there any way to lower these to other values?
>

Following up on this after some time ...

I found a nice tool that will provide you with frequency, temperature and
CPU utilization info in a text terminal.
The package name for Debian/Ubunut is s-tui.
You start the tool, and it will display a nice summary and 'graphs' of this
data.

Here are some screenshots: https://amanusk.github.io/s-tui/

A handy tool for servers, where there is no X.

The other tool that allowed me to throttle back the CPU was cpupower.
It is available when you install the linux-tools-generic package.

You run it as:
cpupower frequency-set --max 1820MHz

And that prevents the CPU from going over 80C (which you use s-tui to
monitor, and adjust
as needed)
-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
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