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Laptop with Debian 9.4.1 overheats

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PhobosTheKitsune
Posts: 2
Joined: 2018-06-22 15:32

Laptop with Debian 9.4.1 overheats

#1 Post by PhobosTheKitsune »

Hello everyone. Last night my 4-yrs-old laptop's primary hdd died. I've replaced it with a chinese 120GB ssd and used a debian 9.4.1 netinst cd to breathe new life into my machine. After the installation i quickly realized that my laptop was strangely hot even when in idle (60-65C). I've tried to set the cpu's governor to powersave (having no luck at all, the sensor plugin reads a stable 60-65C in idle, going all the way to 76C when it's given the task to load a 480p video from youtube), i've installed tlp and then laptop-mode-tools (zero changes at all) and enabled pstate on boot. I've tried to see if there were any applications that were loading the cpu but there were none. Everything that i was expecting to work has failed and now i have absolutely no clue on what to do next. The laptop in question is a HP Pavillion 15-e021el having an Intel Core i5-3230M CPU @ 3.2GHz, 8G of ddr3 ram, Ati Radeon HD8670M and it's running Debian 9.4 with kernel 4.9.0-6 and xfce4 as its only DE. PS: the cooling paste is new and in other operating systems gives absolutely no problems (briefly booted into windows 10 and arch to verify that and got an average of 32C in idle and somewhere about 55 when i was playing doom), the ssd too isn't the cause (for the reason listed before). The only odd thing is that even in powersave the cpu is always running at 3ghz (even when there's no apparent need to do so). Please help me figure out what's causing this problem and how to fix it.
in the grim dark future there are only lags

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stevepusser
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Re: Laptop with Debian 9.4.1 overheats

#2 Post by stevepusser »

What's the result of

Code: Select all

apt policy firmware-amd-graphics
For more hardware information, the state of your graphics drivers, and your software sources, you can install inxi and provide the output of

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inxi -r -F
It might just be missing GPU firmware. You can also try undervolting your CPU with iuvolt. It has a noticeable effect on my i7 eight-gen CPU, but it won't get yours down to Windows temps--that's due to something else.
MX Linux packager and developer

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PhobosTheKitsune
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Joined: 2018-06-22 15:32

Re: Laptop with Debian 9.4.1 overheats

#3 Post by PhobosTheKitsune »

firmware-amd-graphics:
"Installed: (none)
Candidate: 20161130-3
Version table:
20161130-3 500
500 http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch/non-free amd64 Packages
500 http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch/non-free i386 Packages
"
And this is the output from inxi:
"System: Host: KTSN-0004 Kernel: 4.9.0-6-amd64 x86_64 (64 bit)
Desktop: Xfce 4.12.3 Distro: Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)
Machine: Device: laptop System: Hewlett-Packard product: HP Pavilion 15 Notebook PC v: 0883100000305B10000620100
Mobo: Hewlett-Packard model: 1970 v: 95.33 serial: PDPWT048J5J1K4
UEFI: Insyde v: F.28 date: 03/14/2017
CPU: Dual core Intel Core i5-3230M (-HT-MCP-) cache: 3072 KB
clock speeds: max: 3200 MHz 1: 3045 MHz 2: 2934 MHz 3: 2930 MHz
4: 2971 MHz
Graphics: Card-1: Intel 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller
Card-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Sun XT [Radeon HD 8670A/8670M/8690M / R5 M330 / M430 / R7 M520]
Display Server: X.org 1.19.2 drivers: modesetting (unloaded: fbdev,vesa)
tty size: 80x24 Advanced Data: N/A for root
Audio: Card Intel 7 Series/C216 Family High Definition Audio Controller
driver: snd_hda_intel
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture v: k4.9.0-6-amd64
Network: Card-1: Realtek RTL8821AE 802.11ac PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
driver: rtl8821ae
IF: wlp7s0 state: up
Card-2: Realtek RTL810xE PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller
driver: r8169
IF: eno1 state: down
Card-3: Microsoft Xbox 360 Wireless Adapter
IF: N/A state: N/A mac: N/A
Drives: HDD Total Size: 440.1GB (19.0% used)
ID-1: /dev/sdb model: WDC_WD3200BPVT size: 320.1GB
ID-2: /dev/sda model: SSD_120GB size: 120.0GB
Partition: ID-1: / size: 110G used: 7.8G (8%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda2
ID-2: /home size: 279G used: 57G (22%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sdb2
ID-3: swap-1 size: 15.00GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sdb1
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 61.0C mobo: N/A
Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A
Repos: Active apt sources in file: /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ stretch main contrib non-free
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ stretch main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security stretch/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security stretch/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ stretch-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ stretch-updates main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch-backports main
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch-backports main
Active apt sources in file: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list
deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main
Active apt sources in file: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/steam.list
deb [arch=amd64,i386] http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ precise steam
deb-src [arch=amd64,i386] http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ precise steam
Info: Processes: 198 Uptime: 1:38 Memory: 1538.9/7879.8MB
Client: Shell (bash) inxi: 2.3.5
"
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Re: Laptop with Debian 9.4.1 overheats

#4 Post by stevepusser »

Some advice: it's basically very bad practice to run a command as root when I nowhere said anything about doing that.

Your system seems to be doing OK with the integrated Intel graphics. If you want to use the discrete AMD card to speed up 3D rendering, such as in games, you'll need the firmware and learn how to do the switching.

I see you've added the Ubuntu Steam repos, despite the fact that Debian has Steam in the non-free section...did you notice if the machine was running hot or not before you installed Steam from the Ubuntu sources?

I think that the 4.9 kernel, even with pstate in powersave, still shows the CPU at near full speed by default, but that didn't cause high temps on my 6th gen CPU. I have an 8th gen now that's too new for the 4.9 kernel, but the 4.16 and 4.17 kernels I'm running with it let the CPU drop to the lowest speed on powersave...but then, that may also be affected by the BIOS and intel-microcode*. You can switch off the pstate power saving at boot time by adding this flag to the boot line in GRUB:

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intel_pstate=disable
The kernel will then fall back to the cpufreq power governors, so you can test to see if it's the frequency that's making it hot. You can also run the "top" command to see if any processes are running your processor hard.

If that doesn't help, perhaps trying another kernel or even another Debian derivative live session (I help develop MX Linux, so give that a try) would let you see if it's something peculiar to Debian.

* You should seriously consider installing intel-microcode to provide some Spectre exploit mitigation and fix other bugs in the CPU.
MX Linux packager and developer

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