I have a 12th Gen, running Debian.
When even just a couple of the processors are running at 100% for about 15 seconds or more, the CPU package temp hits 100C and stays there.
I once on a video call had the system actually experience thermal shutdown.
Obviously, I’m not happy with the lappy being so hot, and I don’t need it to be.
I’ve been thinking about a solution for a little while and have slowly investigated and now have installed thermald, which does not work out of the box.
Firstly, the systemd service file has options passed to thermald which seem to stop it running, I suspect because some /proc interfaces thermald would like also are not yet present.
As such, systemctl start does not work, out of the box.
When you run it manually, from the command line, by using the “–no-daemon” option, you then fine it does not recognize the 12th Gen processor.
You can get thermald to actually run from the command line by passing in some arguments to ignore these issues, but then thermald for me has has effect; in my case, I still go to 100C just as before.
The upshot of this is that you need to create your own thermald configuration file, and then edit the systemd service file.
Creating your own thermald configuration file is not straightforward.
I looked into it, it’s a complex XML file, you have to learn quite a bit and figure out how to get detailed information from your system about what devices and cooling devices you have.
However, there is a third-party (open source) utility to create it for you.
Unfortunately, quite recently, it seems that utility has stopped being supported - but it still seemed to work just fine for me, and it created five different configuration files (this is normal - apparently sometimes this happens, I think you’re getting options about how much cooling you want) and the third of these files keeps my system at 70C.
The utility is called dpifxtract and is here;
I downloaded the zip file and simply ran it (as root, as it copies files into /etc/thermald), no arguments needed.
If you’re running on a 12th Gen, I expect you to get five config files;
. thermal-conf.xml.0
. thermal-conf.xml.1
. thermal-conf.xml.2
. thermal-conf.xml.3
. thermal-conf.xml.auto
These have also been placed in your /etc/thermald directory (and also dumped into the currency directory).
For me, only thermal-conf.xml.3 made a difference. I deleted the other files, and renamed it “thermal-conf.xml”, as this is the filename used by default by thermald.
Now, finally, we need to adjust the systemd service file for thermald, because as it was when I installed it, thermald would not start (I could run it from the command line only, with the “–no-daemon” option).
Now, I know little about systemd so there is a possibility I be going about this the wrong way.
The path to the file is /etc/systemd/system/thermald.service
Under “[Service]”, you need to edit “ExecStart”.
Mine is now as so;
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/thermald --systemd --dbus-enable --poll-interval=1
In particular, the argument “–adaptive” seems to stop thermald from starting, I suspect because of missing /proc stuff.
The default poll interval is four seconds, I’ve changed this to one, which is just my preference.
That’s it.
If you’ve done all that, on a 12th Gen running latest Debian, you should now max out at 70C.
