Recipie for CPU souffle'

[Arthur Chance]

On 04/02/13 04:02, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
[Overheating CPU war story snipped.]

> I don't know what to make of this, except to suspect that some loose
> wires inside my case got in the way of the CPU fan turning.  (I am
> not neat like some folks.  The inside of myu case _is_ really rather
> sloppy, so this could easly have happened.)

I've had a fan jam that way. Cable ties are your friends.

> I've now installed mbmon and xmbmon and will be watching the CPU temp
> closely for awhile.
>
> I really wish that one or the other of those tools allowed setting a
> threshold CPU temp, beyond which the tool would emit an ear piercing
> alarm via the motherboard speaker... you know.. in case the regular
> external stereo speakers are turned off.
>
> <question>
> What *is* the best way to achieve the above effect, i.e. to arrange
> for the machine to scream for help in case it is getting too hot?
>
> I don't want it to just die, like it is doing now.  I want it to scream
> so that I can rush over and at least try to do an orderly shutdown.
> </question>
>
>
>
> Regards,
> rfg
>
>
> P.S.  I am loading the system pretty heavily now, and have been for the
> last 20+ minutes, and xmbmon is showing me a nice constant 31c for the
> CPU temp.  So for the moment at least, all is well.
>
> P.P.S.  I have a (relatively) monster sized heatsink in this system, and
> it sits atop a quite modest 2.7GHz single-core Athlon, so it is not at
> all surprising that the ``stable'' CPU temp is around 30c (86f).

I tend to use Intel processors so I'm not familiar with your exact 
processor, but does the amdtemp kernel module work for it? If so, you 
could write a shell script that loops doing

	"sysctl -n dev.cpu.<N>.temperature"

for suitable values of <N> and do whatever you like when/if the 
temperature goes above a threshold. "man speaker" and looking at 
/usr/sbin/spkrtest might be useful, just remember you'll probably have 
to "kldload speaker" first.