Re: Unexpected shutdown - perhaps ACPI related?

[Thomas Renninger <trenn@suse.de>]

On Thursday 09 October 2008 13:40:36 Brian Schau wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > Thomas' guess is a good one.  See if this is thermal related.
> > load your cpu with a copy of "cat /dev/zero > /dev/null
> > for each core.  Listen for fans to speed up,
>
> I did so for 10 minutes and the temperatur never rose beyond 72 deg C.
> I also did some other work during that time.
> I couldn't get it to shutdown ...
>
> BTW, the system is a dual core 2GHz system.
>
> > grep . /proc/acpi/thermal*/*/* /proc/acpi/fan/*/*
>
> root@stacy:~# grep . /proc/acpi/thermal*/*/* /proc/acpi/fan/*/*
> /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/cooling_mode:<setting not supported>
> /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/polling_frequency:<polling disabled>
> /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/state:state:                   ok
> /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature:temperature:             73 C
> /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points:critical (S5):           104 C
> grep: /proc/acpi/fan/*/*: No such file or directory
73 C is beyond 72 C :)
104 sounds as if the HW would switch off before, could still be a thermal 
issue. Hmm, but the fans seem to be controlled by HW...

> wrt.to the last line (grep error) - the 'fan' modules is loaded but
> there are not
> files present in the /proc/acpi/fan directory.
>
> Also, when I see the shutdowns it occurs as you described above - the
> hardware shutdown.
Means, the power just gets switched off?
You should try to reproduce this easier somehow. Heavy battery/thermal 
reading, switching cpufreq up and down or something?
How often does that happen?
If it happens often you could try to exclude/not load ACPI drivers, cpufreq 
drivers. Switch off C-states. These are good candidates.

Does this only happen with X?
Maybe using another X driver (vesa fb) solves it?

Did this machine ever worked fine with older kernels/distributions?

     Thomas