CPU Temperature
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Overview
Systems that freeze after a period of use (but not when started cold) may be having problems with overheating. This is especially true for laptops. You can use lm-sensors to determine the temperature of the CPU.
Using lm-sensors
Install and Configure lm-sensors
- Install the lm-sensors package (see InstallingSoftware).
- Run sudo sensors-detect and answer YES to all YES/no questions. I generally use the ISA bus rather than the SMBus bus, your choice to this question!.
- At the end of sensors-detect, a list of modules that needs to be loaded will displayed. Type "yes" to have sensors-detect insert those modules into /etc/modules, or edit /etc/modules yourself.
- Next, run "sudo /etc/init.d/module-init-tools". This will read the changes you made to /etc/modules in step 3, and insert the new modules into the kernel.
- Run "sensors" to get temperature readings.
Run a Stress Test
It is useful to have this running continuously and also have it logging to a file. The following file will record the output of sensors and uptime (so you can monitor the load and get a timestamp) in a file, every 30 seconds and display it on the screen (thanks to the magic of tee and an infinite loop).
while [[ true ]] ; do uptime ; sensors ; sleep 30s; done | tee temp_load.log
Run that command in one terminal window and this in another:
stress --cpu 8 --io 4 --vm 2 --vm-bytes 128M --timeout 4h
This will stress the machine for four hours, or until it crashes ;)
(add --hdd 2 to stress the hard drive as well, though this shouldn't be necessary)
More Information
The ubuntu-maintained page can be found here.
This page contains commands written thanks to the magic of tea!