2.6.24 Temperature/speed _not_ normal - no thermal throttling?

[Ron Rechenmacher <ron@fnal.gov>]

Hi,
I believe I am having a critical thermal problem. I do not know if it
is limited to the 2.6.24.2 kernel which I am running. I do see there has 
been some discussion  about thermal zones and throttling on the list, 
but I can not tell if it means that thermal throttling is not working in 
2.6.24.2

When I try to build several kernel source rpms, my dell d830 laptop 
seems to over heat and hang. It's happened 3 times now and I would like 
to learn what's going on and not let it happen again.

I'm a newbie (and have had problems trying to post :), so I do apologize 
if I've missing something relatively simple or if this is post is not 
appropriate in any way.

I'm running a Scientific Linux 5 (based on RHEL5) distribution and am 
just running a cpuspeed user space utility --- and therefor do not 
believe I have any user space process watching temperature. However, in 
the earlier kernels, I use to be able to (manually) write to 
/proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling and see a change when read back, 
but now the write does not seem to do anything. This might be OK as I 'm 
thinking the kernel and/or the hardware itself might now suppose to be 
doing the throttling?

Anyway, in 3 windows, I run:
  win1: stress --cpu 8 --io 4 --vm 2 --vm-bytes 128M --timeout 180s
  win2: while sleep 1;do cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM/temperature;done
  win3: tail -f /var/log/messages
  win4; while sleep 1;do cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling;done

In win2, I see the temperature go from 50 C  to over 86 C.
In win3, before, the temp in win2 reaches 70 C, I see "kernel: CPU0: 
Temperature/speed normal" (and also CPU1) and "kernel: Machine check 
events logged"
The temperature would probably just continue to climb if I ran the test 
for longer that 180 seconds (the kernel rpms take much longer and do not 
complete before the system hangs :(

In /var/log/mcelog, (running mcelog-0.8pre), I only see "Processor core 
below trip temperature. Throttling disabled" messages. This is strange 
because it seems to be being disabling after never being enabled.  (Is 
there a newer mcelog I should be running?)

The fan speed does increase, but the throttling state indication never 
changes (it's always "T0: 100%"). It seems that when I build the kernel 
rpms, the increased fan speed is not enough to keep the temperature form 
running away. It seems that thermal throttling would be required and is 
not happening.
Should I be doing something from user space? Can I do something from 
user space?

Thanks,
Ron