temperature - Is there a way to reduce a motherboard chipset load in Linux?
2013-08
Andrey Sapegin
I'm interested in reducing the load on the motherboard chipset, or at least, finding what causes the overheating...
I have an HP ProBook 4720s with Ubuntu 12.04, which is slightly overheating. The laptop has an motherboard with the Intel HM57 Express chipset (TDP 3.5W), which becomes quite hot (59-64 degrees Celsius), even if the laptop stays idle. The problem is also described here: notebookreview. From that forum, I think, that the problem is not related to the OS.
The Intel HM57 chip is not connected to the cooling system and has only it's own very small heatsink (radiator) without fan. Also, there is no air flow there (the chipset is located under touchpad, and the laptop case has absolutely no airways there). Changing the thermal grease brings nothing.
However, my idea is not to fix the hardware issues (e.g., cooling system, which is hardly possible for me), but find out, why the chipset is so hot. What makes a load on it? And I hope that it's possible to reduce this load and, therefore, cool down it a bit (hopefully, at least 5 degrees down).
So, the question is: How to investigate the load on chipset under Linux? Is there a way to reduce it?
Thank you in advance,
Kind Regards,
Andrey Sapegin.
P.S. I have already asked the same question on the Ubuntu forums (no answers yet): thread...
P.P.S. What I have found out so early, is that ASPM (Active State Power Management used to manage PCI-e devices) is not enabled. The dmesg says:
ACPI FADT declares the system doesn't support PCIe ASPM, so disable it
ACPI _OSC control for PCIe not granted, disabling ASPM
Unfortunately, 'pcie_aspm=force' and 'i915.i915_enable_rc6=1' kernel options do not help to fix this issue. However, I'm not sure that ASPM and high chipset load are connected...
EDIT: I tried powertop and fixed all tunables to 'Good' (autosuspend for USB, SATA power management, disable NMI watchdog, etc.). But the chipset temperature hasn't changed...
user555
It's unlikely you will be able to solve your problems with software. The southbridge is outside of OS control. The OS has no bearing on how much load the chipset is under. The PCH on the HM57 platform control things such as USB, network and HDD connectivity. Typically the TJ. Max for a PCH is about 90C, so unless you're hitting that limit or have problem with freezing or crashes I wouldn't bother to fix it. Granted this might be a design flaw but there is nothing you can do software vise to ease the load on the PCH.
909 Niklas
If I were you, I'd run pson linux and try to remove those processes that seem expensive or heavy. Overheating used to happen for me for a HP laptop when I compiled programs and compilation is a low priority task, so if you have a task that is overheating the hardware you might try and change the priority of the task. There are more gears to pull with process management, you can read about your operating system by Anders Tanenbaum to learn how to schedule your os and you can ask more spec about linux on the linux and unix site we got here on stackexchange.
Questioner
I built my own computer, and the motherboard is a Zotac ITX GeForce 9300. The Wi-Fi adapter doesn't work and the CD it came with has no Linux drivers. I am using the latest stable release of Linux Mint 7.
Are there any Linux drivers for this adapter, or at least generic Wi-Fi drivers that can work on my adapter?
Here are the results of running lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP79 Host Bridge (rev b1)
00:00.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP79 Memory Controller (rev b1)
00:03.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP79 LPC Bridge (rev b2)
00:03.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP79 Memory Controller (rev b1)
00:03.2 SMBus: nVidia Corporation MCP79 SMBus (rev b1)
00:03.3 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP79 Memory Controller (rev b1)
00:03.4 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation Device 0a98 (rev b1)
00:03.5 Co-processor: nVidia Corporation MCP79 Co-processor (rev b1)
00:04.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP79 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev b1)
00:04.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP79 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev b1)
00:06.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP79 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev b1)
00:06.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP79 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev b1)
00:08.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP79 High Definition Audio (rev b1)
00:09.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP79 PCI Bridge (rev b1)
00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: nVidia Corporation MCP79 Ethernet (rev b1)
00:0b.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP79 SATA Controller (rev b1)
00:0c.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP79 PCI Express Bridge (rev b1)
00:10.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP79 PCI Express Bridge (rev b1)
00:15.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP79 PCI Express Bridge (rev b1)
00:16.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP79 PCI Express Bridge (rev b1)
00:17.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP79 PCI Express Bridge (rev b1)
00:18.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP79 PCI Express Bridge (rev b1)
03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 9300 / nForce 730i (rev b1)
Update: Someone said the WiFi module connects to the board via a USB header. Here are the results of running lsusb:
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 0518:0001 EzKEY Corp. USB to PS2 Adaptor v1.09
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 160a:3184
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 045e:00e1 Microsoft Corp. Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 Receiver
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
ndiswrapper doesn't help at all.
Update 2: I installed the VT6656 Linux driver CesarB posted, but I can only access the network and not the Internet. In addition, every time I boot the system doesn't recognize the adapter. I can reinstall the driver with every boot, but it will still only connect to the network.
CesarB
Your lspci output shows only one Ethernet controller (the wired one, a MCP79 which should be supported by the forcedeth driver). Doing a web search, I found a curious piece of information in a review of your motherboard: "The WiFi module [...] connects to the board via a USB header". If that is true, the information you want will be found not in lspci, but in lsusb.
After finding the correct line in the lsusb output, you can do a search for the ID (which will be something like 1d6b:0002) to find other people discussing the same hardware (people usually post the USB ID in that format when asking for help).
It seems Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu 9.04, which uses a 2.6.28 kernel. You could try a more recent kernel (Ubuntu 9.10, which should be released late this month, uses 2.6.31) to see if there is a driver for your device.
EDIT: Now that you posted the lsusb output, I can see that 160a:3184 is your wireless card. A quick search shows it is a VIA wireless card, apparently called VT6656. It seems there is a driver from VIA for it, and it seems to have been added to the staging tree for cleanup and possible future inclusion in the Linux kernel. See also Ubuntu bug #162671.
quack quixote
To get devices to work properly, you need to identify the chipsets they use. You can do this by visually inspecting the motherboard and recording identifying codes on the physical chips, by searching the 'net for other people who have documented the chipsets on your model of motherboard, and by using linux tools like "lspci".
Once you've identified the chipsets, you can use that to search for what other linux users are using to configure that hardware. Ubuntu forums are a good place to start.
Here's what my Ubuntu 9.04 system looks like from lspci:
$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8378 [KM400/A] Chipset Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237/VX700 PCI Bridge
00:08.0 Mass storage controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3124 PCI-X Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)
00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6120/VT6121/VT6122 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (rev 11)
00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South]
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 60)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV44A [GeForce 6200] (rev a1)
You should be able to spot the audio chipset in there, for example. If you can run lspci on your system and post the output into your question, that will help us help you.
Andy
I'm not sure about the audio side of things, but I've used ndiswrapper to use Windows Wifi drivers within Linux at times.
If you don't have any luck finding slightly more native drivers that should hopefully be able to give you your wireless (though it can sometimes take a bit of work).
CarlF
The GeForce 9300 chipset should be supported by a modern Linux distro, e.g. Ubuntu 9.04. What distro are you using? Have you added the repositories for commercial (non-Free) software and updated? If you give more information on your OS we can be more helpful.
EDIT: Original poster edited the question to include his distro.
I don't know Mint. Have you added that distribution's versions of the multiverse repository to /etc/apt/sources.list? If you do, the necessary drivers should be installed automatically. If not, download the appropriate driver directly from nVidia here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html.