[wplug] Fedora 19, KVM, screensavers, and thermal shutdowns....

Pat Barron pat at lectroid.com
Wed Jan 22 18:30:48 EST 2014


So, this happened to me twice today on my ThinkPad T400:

1)  Boot Fedora 19.
2)  Start Fedora 20 as a KVM guest.
3)  KVM guest goes into screensaver.
4)  Fedora 19 KVM host executes "thermal emergency" shutdown shortly 
thereafter.

I've been running a loop that looks at the thermal sensors (just cat'ing 
/proc/acpi/ibm/thermal every 60 seconds); I don't know if the values 
listed for the temperatures are degrees Celsius, or just some arbitrary 
numbers, or whatever.  But whatever they are, the temperature of the 
first sensor value reported was pretty stable around 47 for a long time, 
even with the KVM guest running.  Then as soon as the screensaver kicked 
in, the value shot up to 73 within sixty seconds.  Then 78, 81. 83. 85, 
87, and 88, in sixty second increments thereafter.  The value of the 
third sensor reported was also going up, but not as high, and not as fast.

As soon as I brought it out of screensaver (which I did because I didn't 
want it to keep heating up), the first sensor went back down to 72 
within sixty seconds.

I'm assuming that the screensaver graphics are highly CPU-bound, and 
working the CPU so hard is what's making the temperature shoot up. But 
I've never seen this behavior (with the spontaneous "thermal emergency" 
shutdowns) before today.  This is just after running "yum update" and 
updating to kernel-3.12.8-200.fc19.x86_64, though this may just be a 
coincidence.

Anyone ever see anything like this before?

--Pat.



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