radeon power_profile "default" causes laptop overheating and crashes

Pasi Kärkkäinen pasik at iki.fi
Mon Aug 29 09:20:16 PDT 2011


Hello,

I have a laptop with Mobility Radeon HD 3650, and the opensource radeon driver makes
the laptop overheat and crash (or kernel does thermal emergency shutdowns).
Even when the laptop is totally *idle* the system overheats!

As a default power_profile "default" is in use (and causes problems):
# cat /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile
default

I can workaround the issue with:
# echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

.. which makes the temperature go down 10-20 degrees celsius,
and the fans slow down and the system feels much cooler.

I've seen this problem with Linux 2.6.35 (Fedora 14), Linux 2.6.38 (Fedora 15)
and Linux 3.0.0 (Fedora 16 alpha).

Is there anything I should try to troubleshoot the problem? 
Is "default" power_profile supposed to cause overheating?

Using proprietary AMD fglrx driver doesn't have this problem, 
fglrx works out-of-the-box and the laptop does not overheat.

dmesg from Linux 3.0.0 here: http://pasik.reaktio.net/fedora/f16/dmesg-hp-elitebook-8530p-f16-alpha.txt

Thanks,

-- Pasi



More information about the dri-devel mailing list