Debian – How to chase a program who is rising up the laptop’s temperature

cpudebianprocess

After 40 days of non-upgrading I came back from a trip and I decided to dist-upgrade my Debian Sid box. Everything went fine but after rebooting I noticed that the temperature was 15°C over its average.
There isn't any process eating more CPU than normal but something is clearly going on. Seeing my system monitor applet for Processor load, when the machine is idle, I can see little blue peaks from time to time which I don't remember having them, maybe that could be a clue. Anyway, I cannot see anything strange in my top command output.

So, how can I trace the origin of this heater process?

Best Answer

I belive atop allows to monitor even short programs. Powertop allows to monitor states of processor. However if the peaks are hardly noticable it is unlikely that it caused this problem.

There are however few possible causes:

Corrected ACPI handling. For some reasons the temperature in ACPI was read incorrectly and the correct temperature was always 15°C highier (or incorrect). Does the computer feels warmer
The newer kernel may have worst temperature management (like lacking p4-clockmod etc.) - it may be bug in kernel.
Previously mentioned dust.

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Linux CPU – How to Set Processor Affinity of a Process

I have used taskset for this. If you have taskset installed, something like:

taskset -cp 0,2 45678

would set the process with id 45678 to have an affinity to cpus 1 and 3.

Shell – How to enable safeguards for CPU temperature

You could write a script to display your temperature in dwm's status bar, for example:

temp (){
    awk '{print $4"°C"}' <(acpi -t)
    echo $temp
}
xsetroot -name "$(temp)"

Your sensors output may be more complex, depending on your setup: this works on one of my machines:

 awk '/temp1/ {print +$2"°C"}' <(sensors)

If you patch in statuscolours, you can additionally have the output change colour as the $temp hits higher values...

The Arch Wiki has an introduction to setting up a basic statusbar script and the dwm site includes an .xinitrc example.

You can see my dwm-status script for more details: http://beta.intuxication.org/jasonwryan/archer/file/tip/Scripts/dwm-status

Best Answer

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Linux CPU – How to Set Processor Affinity of a Process

Shell – How to enable safeguards for CPU temperature

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