Problems with xenpm and temperature

User Support
1

My temperature is usually well above 80 degrees celsius and can get up in the high 80s when doing lots of tasks. I don’t want it to be this hot.

I have tried

sudo xenpm set-scaling-governor powersave

and get responses like

[CPU1] failed to set governor name (22 - Invalid argument)

when I check to see what the governor is, however, it will say it’s in powersave for all cpus. However, the temperature is still well above 80 C.

I have tried to alter the max frequency.

sudo xenpm set-scaling-maxfreq 1000000000

and get

CPU1] failed to set scaling max freq (22 - Invalid argument)

as a response for all the CPUs and the system temperature is still well over 80 C degrees. Sometimes I have seen it go up over 90.

What can I do to reduce the CPU frequency?

2

It might be different for different computers but I could not get the setting you tried to keep temps low on my computer either. I could however disable-turbo-mode and that lowered the temperature to a reasonable amount. Helped with fan noise too. My system is an amd 4000 thinkpad.

3

Try some new thermal paste.

4

I don’t know what that is.

5

I get invalid for every single CPU. This is especially a problem for systems that naturally run hotter and do not have a lot internal cooling. The Qubes developers should look into this. I think this is likely affecting more users than just me and may also be making it harder to run qubes for some new users.

Can I take a graphical fedora program like cpufreq-gui and just copy it into dom0 using cat and then run it?

6

Do you have an Intel CPU or an AMD one? If you are using an Intel CPU, then the issue may be helpful.

TL;NR: You can try enabling dom0 testing repo and upgrade Xen, to have Intel-specific scaling driver support.