Well, I'd hardly call my testing scientific but I did print out the output of all the temperature sensors in /sys/devices/platform/applesmc and found that they were mostly not that high compared to what I got on OS X so it would be weird if there were other sensors elsewhere that were very high. Still, I'll defer to your knowledge of this. Looking a bit at the webpage of the GPLed OS X program smcFanControl I see that the author thinks its a bad idea to set your fan speed manually and that's probably right. I guess I'll wait for powerplay and dynticks and try it again.
I'm a little frustrated in that I don't even know what the potential cause of the power management issues are. What is the SMC doing in OS X that makes things so much better? Does OS X just have functional powerplay and its own version of dynticks or is it something else? On someone's blog I read that dynticks on Linux seemed to reduce power usage on his machine from 21 watts to 18 watts but that it would go up and down because of various things waking his processor up. http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/2006/01/11/ That's not a huge power savings so I'm not sure this will really resolve the issue in the future. Also it doesn't seem (from various posts I've seen on this list) that powerplay on the core duo really leads to much power savings so is this still not the root of our problems? My "feedback" to apple asking for them to release the SMC specs has fallen on deaf ears (at least for now). Has anyone else tried contacting them about this? cheers, Sheer On 3/28/07, Nicolas Boichat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Sheer El-Showk wrote: > > I just ran 2.6.20 with a patched ati 8.34.8 driver (don't have the > > link handy) but when i tried to suspend using the suspend option on > > shutdown the machine suspended and wouldn't come back to life. Maybe > > I should have just tried to close the lid. > > > > There were a few other things that did not seem to work spectacularly > > well. The trackpad is pretty good, a little better (maybe) than it > > used to be, but still not as good as in OS X, particularly when it > > comes to two finger scrolling. What are others' experience with this. > > > > The main annoying point is the fans. They seem to run constantly > > while i can just that my CPU temperatures are never very high. Today > > in OS X my CPUs got up to 60+ and the fans never went above 2000 rpms > > whereas in Linux they rush up to 3000 or 4000 the moment the CPU gets > > active. Is there some way to change this behaviour? It would be good > > to gather some data from OS X to figure out what the safety margins > > are and control how often the fans start up. Anyone know a tool that > > can plot/store fan vs temperature data in OS X? > > The fans are controlled by the SMC (i.e. by the hardware). I'm almost > certain OS X doesn't change anything about the behaviour of the chip. > > I think the fans run slower on OS X because the power management is > better, that's all. > > Also note that I don't think the SMC uses the temperature sensors that > are in the processor (i.e. coretemp in Linux), but it uses other > sensors, with different temperature readings. > > Best regards, > > Nicolas > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v2.0.3 (GNU/Linux) > Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org > > iD8DBQFGCgxn01ajQnpJXgERAhtEAJ9Z1BIrFWTPhdKkON40tNVK8M4MSACfUhOL > vfjB6D25rn6rHdqLfjQTMHM= > =sD0o > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Mactel-linux-users mailing list Mactel-linux-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mactel-linux-users
