Hello everybody,
i've just installed the 5.10.45 client on my SUSE linux laptop which is normally used as a small webserver. Since BOINC is calculating, the fan of the laptop is permanently running which is quite annoying.
I've already changed the online-setup to use at most 50% of CPU time, but the fan is still running with short breaks. Is this part of the setup ignored by the linux client or do i still have to reduce the CPU time?

Timo

Hello everybody,
i've just installed the 5.10.45 client on my SUSE linux laptop which is normally used as a small webserver. Since BOINC is calculating, the fan of the laptop is permanently running which is quite annoying.
I've already changed the online-setup to use at most 50% of CPU time, but the fan is still running with short breaks. Is this part of the setup ignored by the linux client or do i still have to reduce the CPU time?

Timo

After you made the settings change, did you click Update on the project in BOINC Mgr? It needs to download the settings from the web after any changes.

Setting it to 50% means that boinc will "pulse" - run for one second, pause for one second, run for one second, pause for one second, etc. you should be able to see this if you use a system monitor to view your running processes, as long as the update interval is short enough. For example you could fire up "top" in a terminal and then set the update interval to 0.5 seconds (hit 's' then enter '0.5')

This pulsing may still cause the CPU to stay in full power mode most of the time. What may help is telling linux to keep your CPU in powersave mode all the time, assuming your CPU supports frequency scaling. There are several ways to do this. I usually just go to a terminal and use the cpufreq-selector utility. 'cpufreq-selector -g powersave' should do the trick, assuming suse has the cpufrequtils package installed.

As long as the CPU stays at 1 GHz, my Core2duo laptop can run BOINC at full CPU usage with minimal fan activation. Obviously it takes more CPU time to finish work units this way but at least my legs don't get burned to a crisp.

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Toby, thank you for your answer.
I found the respective settings in SUSE YaST. I set the frequency scaling to "permanent", unfortunately it didn't change the behaviour of the fan. It is still active every 30 seconds for about 10 seconds, no matter if I set the scaling to 10% or 90%.....
Maybe I will take this opportunity to change over to Ubuntu Linux and hope that this will have a better effect on the CPU's powersaving features.

Thanks again and take care of your legs ;-)

Timo