Thermal Issues Appear To Cause My ASUS Zenbook Linux Woes

[dungeon]

Running mprime for about 6 hours produce 0 errors, 0 warnings.

It seems issue is there only when browser is open, is that also your case Michael . Recently i updated that abandonware flash player for Firefox , so lets remove that blob to see how it will goes in the following days .

[grigi]

I had a desktop with a similar issue. It happened because when the system was idle, it would clock the chipset down (This wasn intel P45 chipset) AND lower the voltage. It would go unstable pretty much right after it was being pushed hard. So, the solution for this specific MB was to set the chipset voltage higher in the BIOS and then the problem dissapeared. Now I really doubt a notebook would allow you to do something like this in the BIOS though. I wonder if you can disable some chipset power-management in software on Linux?

[bdkoepke]

Set the maximum cpu frequency to a lower value

I had a similar overheating issue with my old macbook pro. I was shipped a laptop with a 2.6GHz processor and the laptop would randomly reboot if it sat in that pstate for more than a few minutes. (This was an old 2007 core2 macbook so 2.6GHz was as fast as you could get in an intel laptop at the time).

My solution was to limit the maximum pstate to 2.4GHz.

Assuming acpi-cpufreq has been loaded (modprobe acpi-cpufreq):

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies
260000000 24000000 22000000

Pick one of them that is less than the maximum, so in this case try 24000000 first

for i in cpu{0,1,2,3} # assuming 4 cpus
do
echo 24000000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/$i/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq
done

This fixed the issue on my old macbook. Obviously this isn't an ideal solution but at least the laptop worked. I would rather run at 2.4Ghz than 2.6 and not have to deal with the laptop overheating.

This way you can leave the laptop with the default ondemand governor, the laptop just won't run at 100% throttle.

Hope this helps.

[dungeon]

Enough testing from me, just remove flash player so that your browser can't touch it at all Michael . I am serious about that .

[Luke]

You can disable/reenable flash w/o restarting browser.

Enough testing from me, just remove flash player so that your browser can't touch it at all Michael . I am serious about that .

No need to remove it outright. I normally keep Flash turned off to force use of HTL5 and block Flash exploits, will only turn it on to play a video from a known safe site. W/o flash or Java, it also gets harder to fingerprint browsers as fewer fonts, etc can be enumerated.

To turn flash on or off, go to add-ons, select "plugins" and enable or disable Flash, then reload the affected page only. Selective (click to play) enabling unfortunately won't force HTML5 but will block flash exploits and flash-based tracking.

[dungeon]

@Luke

I know that, but that enable/disable seems is not enough . Because these reboots happens even if i do nothing in browser, just have browser open and flash player initiased in it .

Of course i am not 100% sure in this, but those GPU lockups then reboots and after complitely removed flash, does not happen in last 2-3 days.
We will see, issue is very odd one (not at all easely reproducible and take much time) , maybe it will happen after few days again .

[asdfblah]

(This thread an the other articles are TL;DR)
Well, what do the sensors say? Are you running an applet/app to check the temps easily? I know about conky, gkrellm, and "sensors" itself...
Did you update the BIOS?
Have you tried googling it? ( https://www.google.com/search?q=Zenb...om&btnG=Search ) There are a bunch of pages about this particular model, and, as far as I can read (a quick glance... plus ctrl+f "heat" or "hot" or "temp"), none seems to indicate this particular problem:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2193133

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/721208-asus-zenbook-infinity-ux301la-just-announced-computex-48.html

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Asus/UX301LA

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ASUS_UX301LA

It's all the help I can offer...