# Can Gentoo kill my hardware?

## Suer7reus

I'm terribly concerned.  I have a year-old Dell XPS (the original) laptop, and I'm worried Gentoo has caused some hardware damage.  Don't get me wrong, I love Gentoo, and I'm an experienced user; I configured a firewall, webserver, DNS server, Samba PDC, and many more services on my quad Xeon box at home.  But my laptop keeps having the sort of hardware issue where its performance is awful.  I sent the thing back, and they replaced the video card, which seemed to fix the problem.  That lasted a few days in Windows, but not long after installing a stage1 Gentoo system my performance was back in the toilet.  My ever-so-scientific test was a good game of Halo in Windows.  Now, a month later, my performance is terrible.  Firefox is almost too much for the machine in Linux, and although baseline performance is better in Windows I still can't play games at a functional framerate.  This is the second time, as I said, that I have had these similar performance issues with this computer, and the only times I can with certainty remember the thing working correctly were after purchase and repair (around which time i wiped my HDD), before I put Gentoo on the machine.  Dell is fixing the thing again, but my warranty effectively up and I can't afford to damage my box.  Plus I really want to play Doom 3.  I'll throw in a list of hardware at the bottom, and I'd sure appreciate hearing from anyone, especially from folks whose similar hardware has survived a Gentooing in full working order.  I love my Gentoo setup; I really don't want to have to use that other OS on my computer (it was only for games, reading all my data off a shared ext3 partition - http://ext2fsd.sf.net), but I'd rather do that than have a useless dual-booting box.  Oh, and don't tell Dell I used the L-word.

HardwareIntel Pentium 4 w/ HT (SMT) @ 3.4 GHz, 1Mb cache

1Gb DDR400 RAM

Fujitsu 60Gb 7200rpm IDE drive (PATA)

ATI Radeon 9800 w/ 256Mb VRAM

Intel 8280-based motherboard (ICH5)

The one I'm particularly worried about is the video card.  I use a 2.6.14-nitro2 kernel and ati-drivers (binary), with vesafb-tng as my console framebuffer driver.  Is there any way these could have killed my card?  It still draws pictures, just not 3D ones at any usable speed.  The other worry I have relates to a problem I have had with several laptops including this one where the screen appears to "melt down" and gradually turn a damaging-looking sort of green.  This happens upon mode switch, occurring particularly frequently when switching from X to a VT for instance.  My solution is to immediately power-off the machine, which I have always managed to do very promptly so far.

Is it safe to keep Gentoo on my box after my final repair?  Help!

Thanks in advance =).

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## vampares

Sound like a X11 opengl driver.  Use # opengl-update ati.  You should turn the fans on full while compiling and it should be ok.

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## vampares

If you don't use the fans except when the system turns them on you will likely start to have problems w/ a full size processor and large screen.  The manufactures are aware of the noise fans make and so use them as little as possible.  They test this w/ what would be ordinary conditions and adjust for profit margins.  Compiling isn't ordinary.

Screen melting is kind of weird.  I've never seen that before.  Although Ive heard of green shadows.

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## Suer7reus

Thank you vampares.

The fans are almost always on and set to high because the CPU temperature lives in the high 60's unloaded and low to mid 70's loaded (both temperatures are with fans on full speed, any less and it idles above 70).  Another disturbing symptom is that my temperature hovers around 70 with both fans on, once I even cpufreq'ed the chip down to 12% and acpi throttled it down to 12%.  That should run my P4 at the effective clock speed of a 486DX... (although the ACPI throttling doesn't truly cycle down the chip, it just idles 87% of the cycles for low temps and power).  It may be worth noting that although compiling is irregular CPU activity, from Hell's point of view (erm, Dell), the machine is designed and marketed as a gaming platform, and as such should be expecting some degree of sustained stress.

As for the X11 opengl driver, I opengl-update ati lots (via eselect), including every time I change anything X-or fglrx-related.  If you still think that is the problem, please explain further.

[EDIT]

Screen melting is extremely weird.  I have at times and on other machines fooled myself into thinking that the LCD inverter was overheating (due to unusually high temperatures around the bottom of the screen right after I cut the power).  On the other laptops, a kernel config including framebuffer console drivers caused the melting every time the machine was booted (during kernel booting).

[/EDIT]

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## TinheadNed

FYI I wouldn't use ACPI throttling.  It has minimal temperature benefits on any CPU I've tried it with.  Frequency stepping is an order of magnitude more effective.

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## Suer7reus

Don't worry, I don't.  I read somewhere that because of the way it works, it's totally useless (even theoretically) for one of the only reasons one would even use it; I dont remember if it was battery/power usage or temperature control...

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## augury

The fans should be dropping the temp down to < 44 when idling.  < 80 shouldn't cause problems but i wonder what the gfx card temp is.

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## die_vms_die

Heat can kill it.  Assuming fan are working in Linux I don't see how it can possible get hotter in Gentoo than while playing Halo in Windows.

Gaming will heat up both CPU and GPU, so compiling should be less total heat.

The clock speed(voltage) has a significant impact on heat.  Using folding@home and different governors attempted to find equilibrium temperature for all extremes of load and cpufreq.  Back of notebook sitting on thin book to improve air flow, intakes air from bottom.  It's an amd64 3000+ in HP zv5000 series notebook.

Highest clock speed under full load.  Heats up to 60 C before second fan kicks on cooling back down 55C.

Highest clock speed, idle cpu.  40 C.

Slowest clock speed, under full load. 38 C.

Slowest clock speed idle cpu.  34 C

Little bit shocking that to me that full load at 800 Mhz is cooler than idling at 1800 Mhz.

Kernel configuration.

 *Power management options->ACPI->Thermal Zone wrote:*   

> This driver adds support for ACPI thermal zones.  Most mobile and some desktop systems support ACPI thermal zones.  It is HIGHLY recommended that this option be enabled, as your processor(s) may be damaged without it.   
> 
> 

 

Check for /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature

Are you sure that the cpufreq is really changing?

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq

Look at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/power-management-guide.xml#doc_chap3.

Never owned a Dell.  Owned Two HP's, two smaller oem boxes, and and iBook.

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## Suer7reus

Thanks for your replies!  Now I feel justifiably wrathful.  If an amd64 3000+ can stay under 60 with the fans cranked, my <insert four-letter word[s] here> P4 ought not to run at 75.  As for ACPI, I put in everything but the proverbial kitchen sink.  I am of the microkernel parsuasion for desktop / notebook boxes, but the ACPI modules all load immediately on boot.  With regard to CPU scaling, I'm pretty sure the frequency was really changing - my Gnome applet said so, and stuff ran even slower than always.  I can't test for sure right now though because my box is back with the wonderful folks at Dell being examined so they can tell me it's a software problem.  Four Windows reinstalls and counting, and it's still a software problem.  But now I'm just bitter.  Anyway, thank you so much die_vms_die for you invaluable data; that was just what I needed!

My conclusion so far is that, as you said, since the fans are on, Gentoo must not be at fault.  Even if it ran hotter while compiling than while playing Halo, Dell owes me a system that can compile C code [in Windows, if they prefer] in addition to playing stupid games.  If they don't fix my system correctly this time (4th service call + countless phone hours), they can take their damn EZ-bake computer and go to Hell.

Sorry for ranting; hopefully you box-lovers understand how frustrating this is...

Thanks again for your help!

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