From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751461AbWJHVSe (ORCPT ); Sun, 8 Oct 2006 17:18:34 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751462AbWJHVSe (ORCPT ); Sun, 8 Oct 2006 17:18:34 -0400 Received: from gprs189-60.eurotel.cz ([160.218.189.60]:13006 "EHLO amd.ucw.cz") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751461AbWJHVSd (ORCPT ); Sun, 8 Oct 2006 17:18:33 -0400 Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 23:18:21 +0200 From: Pavel Machek To: Arjan van de Ven Cc: Keith Chew , linux-kernel Subject: Re: BIOS THRM-Throttling and driver timings Message-ID: <20061008211821.GA4280@elf.ucw.cz> References: <20f65d530610030729o42658bd6hcc204f8deac4a33e@mail.gmail.com> <1159886437.2891.532.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1159886437.2891.532.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org> X-Warning: Reading this can be dangerous to your mental health. User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.11+cvs20060126 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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. > in general linux should be ok with this happening. However for specific > cases... you'll need to provide more information; you're not > mentioning Really? AFAICT P4 will happily slow down behind our backs, making at least udelays() with interrupts disabled sleep for too long. > (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) At least in toshiba notebook, I was hitting thermal throttling even through both fans were okay. There are many misdesigned machines out there, I fear. Pavel -- (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html