Fan is always running and temperature is warmer than normal.

I installed Ubuntu 11.10 on my HP DV6T and the fan is always running which consumes a lot of power.

When I type "sensors" on cmd it's shows this line:
temp1: +55.0°C (crit = +99.0°C)

I see that it says that the 99 is the critical, but I don't think that 55 degrees is normal with just normal browsing. My laptop is not like this on Windows 7. Any advice for this?

 

What are ur temps idling on windows? What graphics drivers are you using?

55C doesn't seem that high. Fan always running is a diff story though. Need more info from you to help...

 

Idle in windows is below is about 40+ degrees. My graphics is Radeon 6770.

The fan is really always running on Ubuntu 11.10 but it's not like this on Windows. Is this really an issue on 11.10?

 

What graphics drivers are you using?

 

Are you running opensource drivers? Unfortunately power management with open source drivers are crap. Propriety drivers offer better power management (so fan doesn't run like crazy) and better 3d performance, but I have found 2d performance to be pretty poor.

Unfortunately ATI have a horrible reputation with linux, so the best you can do is install the prop. drivers to circumvent this, or get an nvidia card, it makes a big difference

You can also force a low power mode in the opensource drivers, but this makes 2d performance choppy, so i'd recommend installing propriety drivers first.

 

I checked back in Windows and the idle mode is about 42 degrees. I'm using the stock graphic drivers.

When I first installed Ubuntu, it was running around 66 degrees. I edited my /etc/rc.local to turn off the ATI and it goes down around 55 degrees but the fan is still running all the time.

 

What does "stock" mean - stock as in open source i.e. you haven't installed any extra drivers?

If so, in ubuntu, hit the super key, search for "Additional Drivers", hit the icon, and let it load... then install the current version (i.e. NOT the version with post-release updates, have had a problem with them).

Try that and see if it helps!!

 

I remember before after installing Ubuntu, I had both cores running at near 100%. I changed a setting in the bios to correct it, but I do not remember what I changed. Is you CPU constantly running at or near 100%?

 

I'd say that 55.0°C isn't all that bad, depending on HP's power management. I have a notebook that actually is cooler while streaming HD than it is during websurfing or when idle. Why? The manufacturer has a power management scheme that keeps the fan off most of the time when the CPU is idle or lightly utilized.

Linux doesn't always play very nicely with a dedicated GPUs or switchable graphics, and power management with the latest generation CPUs might not be ideal. I'd say your 55.0°C isn't unreasonable, as long as HDD temps aren't overly high.

Personally, I wouldn't expect all that much from the DV6 as far as cooling. Your i5 will probably be fine, but there are throttling issues with quad-core i7s.

 

If you've got a 2nd gen core i CPU, it WILL RUN HOT for now. There was a nasty power usage regression in the 2.6.3x series kernels along the way, and since you can't get the earlier kernels to work well with modern sandybridge HW, you're stuck, for now, with the power usage regression.

This should be addressed in the next ubuntu release, 12.04 which I'm going to test on my spare SandyBridge laptop to see how it works to lower power usage on the CPU.

 

All distribution of Linux have this problem?

 

Sometimes issues are kernel related and you need to wait for an updated kernel for the fix. We're coming up on linux 3.3, and there are supposed to be a number of power regression fixes.

 

yes, all current distros have this problem. you have to go back a year or more to get a kernel that doesn't have this issue.

The 3.3 kernel has the fixes for the power usage regression, and canonical is supposedly back porting them to the 3.2 kernel for 12.04. It looks like they're either not all in or only partially in. I tried a snapshot from last week on my spare sandybridge machine and went from 120 minutes to 141 minutes on battery. A gain, but I'm really hoping to go from 120 minutes to 240 minutes etc.

 

So 10.04 would work fine?

 

No, going back to an earlier version of the kernel might remove or degrade support for other aspecst of your system.

3.3-rc1 is already here, so you don't have to wait much longer.

 

I've had bad luck with Ubuntu releases properly configuring themselves for CPU frequency scaling. The CPUs would sit at maximum clockspeed (got 2.4 Ghz C2D processor) until I changed the governor and settings in the governor located at /etc/cpufreqd.conf. This was on Mint 10 (Ubuntu 10.10) and I've not played with Ubuntu releases outside of VM's since then.

I think 11.10 comes with cpufrequtils so the command 'cpufreq-info' will tell you what your clockspeeds are for each core.

About the kernel power regression, I found this to be helpful
Ubuntu Forums - View Single Post - [ubuntu] Samsung series 9

 

New Linux kernel fixes power-saving issues - The H Open Source: News and Features

 

The ASPM detection issue has virtually nothing to do with CPU temperature. It's good that we have a work-around for buggy BIOSs, but if you're expecting this to drop CPU temperatures tremendously I'm afraid you might be in for some disappointment. (Also, it's not a "regression". It's a fix for a behavior that crashed some machines with buggy BIOSs. It's being replaced by an even better implementation that happens to lower power usage in the process.)

I hate to ask the obvious, but since AFAIK it hasn't been answered: are you sure you don't have some process that's stuck burning up CPU time?