Re: BIOS THRM-Throttling and driver timings

[Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>]

On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 03:29 +1300, Keith Chew wrote:
> Hi
> 
> We have a motherboard that has Thermal Throttling in the BIOS (which
> we cannot disable). This causes the CPU usage to go up and down when
> the CPU temperature reaches (and stays around) the Throttling
> temperature point.
> 
> What we would like to know is whether this will affect the timings in
> drivers, eg the wireless drivers we are using. What can we check in
> drivers' code that will tell us that its operations may be affected
> the throttling?
> 
> In the past few days, we noticed that some of the linux units we
> deployed freezes after deveral hours of operation, we are now trying
> to reproduce the problem in our test environment. Some insight on the
> affect of throttling will help us narrow down the search.


Hi,

in general linux should be ok with this happening. However for specific
cases... you'll need to provide more information; you're not mentioning
which drivers you are using for example. Or even which versions of the
kernel etc etc....

(also: if you actually HIT throttling, there is something very very
wrong; you're not supposed to hit that unless the fan is defective, but
never in "normal" healthy operation. If you do hit it without hardware
defects then there is most likely a fundamental airflow problem you'll
want to fix urgently)


-- 
if you want to mail me at work (you don't), use arjan (at) linux.intel.com