CentOS 7 + Dell Latitude E6420 Laptop = Thermalshutdown

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deoren schreef:

Thanks for the feedback. Did you have to install or configure any packages differently for the laptops than you would a desktop?

Hello,

Not realy. I don’t use any packages for battery optimalisation or anything like that. By coincidence, I will have latitude E 6420 ‘s available for testing on thursday. Greetz, Johan

9 thoughts on - CentOS 7 + Dell Latitude E6420 Laptop = Thermalshutdown

  • I’d say that’s a happy coincidence (for me anyway). If you experience similar issues please share your experience. I hope to be able to invest some time troubleshooting the issue in the next few days and will start with checking the fan speed (per earlier recommendations) before the system shuts down again.

  • The most common issue with E6 series laptops is dust/lint/hair in the fan grill.

    The bios fan control is based on an efficient extraction of heat, but a small amount of lint will keep it heatsink warmer longer.

    That is the tell tail sign, as it is not cool when under low to no load.

    Force the fan to high (dell diagnostic CD or other program) should be strong
    (moves an empty paper coffee cup) cold air blowing.

    -Jason

  • Good tip, thanks.

    I tried using the onboard Dell diagnostics and it shows that the current Processor Fan speed is about 2906 RPMs. It _did_ click loudly once and then appeared to pick back up. Attempts to run the test aren’t yielding any high spin up/down noises like I’m used to hearing from other systems.

    Current thermal readings (inside of the diagnostics screen):

    CPU Thermistor: 65C
    Ambient Thermistor: 27 C
    SODIMM Thermistor: 39 C
    Video Thermistor: 54 C

    Back on the topic of the diagnostics, I’m running a CPU stress test and the CPU Thermistor has grown to 69 C.

    After some time the fan speed has finally increased to 3257 RPM and I
    can finally clearly hear that it is spinning. Once the test completed and the CPU temp started dropping, so did the fan speed, finally settling back to about 2900 RPM.

    I’m still puzzled why the laptop appears to lockup when attempting to login to the desktop environment when using CentOS, but not Ubuntu
    15.04. Any thoughts there?

    Back on the topic of CentOS, I ran ‘watch /usr/bin/sensors’ for about 20
    minutes and the temp only slightly fluctuated. It was only the login attempt that shut down the system.

  • We also saw some problems with recent Dell machines with “SpeedStep” or whatever Intel calls their power/speed management these days.

    One developer measured a very significant increase in speed after completely disabling support for it in his kernel on multiple Linux variants.

    I don’t have the details from him, but he said the system went from “almost unusable on a daily basis”, to, “I can actually get things done”.

    He mainly uses it as a desktop replacement, so he didn’t care about any benefits from power management to save battery, etc.

    Very “informal” note… I don’t have the data to turn in bug reports, or time to chase it down.

    He shared what he did informally with a couple of other devs and “hallway discussions” have indicated that they also agreed that they had better performance from the machines.


    Nate Duehr denverpilot@me.com

  • Sorry, meant to chop the reply off of that previous post after I typed it. Argh… accidental top-posting. Icky!

    :-)

    Nate

  • Hi,

    Thanks for your feedback. I can’t say I’m “happy” that someone else is having the same problem, but I’m relieved that it’s not just something odd with the setup I am using.

    Any luck? I’m hoping to have a chance to look more into this myself in the next few weeks once some other projects calm down. Ironically my next step was going to be going after an updated video card driver.

  • Thanks for the feedback. I’m a little late getting around to it, but I
    got a chance yesterday to look at this again and followed the steps to enable the ELRepo repository and installed the `kmod-nvidia` package.

    Once I did so, I was given a warning that there was a conflict with libglamoregl and to see the wiki page for more details. I looked on the site and found this page:

    http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-nvidia

    which covered not only that issue (basically run `yum remove xorg-x11-glamor`) but also emphasized that ‘kmod-nvidia’ might not work for some older chipsets and that the ‘nvidia-detect’ package should be installed and run to check for compatibility.

    I did so and got this output:

    kmod-nvidia
    Optimus hardware detected: An Intel display controller was detected
    Either disable the Intel display controller in the BIOS
    or use the bumblebee driver to suport Optimus hardware

    Now that the ‘kmod-nvidia’ driver was installed I rebooted the laptop to load it upon boot. Since I had rebooted, I checked my BIOS settings and sure enough I had the ‘Enable Optimus’ box selected. Figuring myself clever (ha), I disabled the option and attempted to boot the laptop. I
    got a blinking cursor against a black background and the password prompt to decrypt the disk and finish booting was never given.

    Since Ctrl+Alt+Del didn’t appear to work, I held the power button and forced the laptop off. I then re-enabled the option and when the laptop next booted I got the password prompt to decrypt the disk and the laptop got to the point where Gnome should have loaded, but the system went no further. My notes are unclear at this point whether I was referring to the login window not displaying or whether it did and just logging into the desktop environment didn’t work.

    I then installed the ‘bumblebee’ package and I was able to login without locking up the system.

    I then wiped the laptop, disabled the Optimus support in BIOS and did a clean installation making sure to use the same settings for the new installation as the old.

    The system booted up and I logged into KDE with no issues and the laptop remained powered on. Presumably the Optimus option was the issue all along.

    In summary:

    * If I have the Optimus option enabled I need to enable the ELRepo repository and install the kmod-nvidia (presumably) and bumblebee packages.

    * If I have the Optimus option disabled it appears that I don’t need to do anything else other than install CentOS 7 normally and use it.

    Thanks again for your help with this.