Re: Better Thermal Management for the Workstation - Fedora 33 Self-Contained Change proposal

[Jared Dominguez <jaredz@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 12:10 PM Vitaly Zaitsev via devel <devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 30.06.2020 17:57, Jared Dominguez wrote:
> Something that needs to be cleared up here: thermald has existed for the
> better part of a decade and long before dptfxtract existed.

Thermald will not work without config being installed.

You can remove all configs from /etc/thermald and try to start systemd
unit. It will shutdown immediately.

(BTW, for some context, I was directly involved in the discussion at Dell -- when I was one of the Linux leads there -- that resulted in someone at Intel creating dptfxtract as a temporary solution until Intel's open source folks could find a better solution for supporting DPTF Active policies. I started at Red Hat in April and asked Benjamin to revisit this topic since thermald is still incredibly useful without dptfxtract. Plus, a former colleague at Dell noticed some Fedora users having issues that are solved by using thermald (even without dptfxtract).)

thermald predates dptfxtract existing. dptfxtract exists to dynamically pull OEM platform specific configs for only certain kinds of newer DPTF tables. thermald still runs on most other Intel systems. For example, my system only has /etc/thermald/thermal-cpu-cdev-order.xml inside /etc/thermald, and that one xml file only contains this:
"""

<!--
Specifies the order of compensation to cool CPU only.
There is a default already implemented in the code, but
this file can be used to change order

The Following cooling device can present
-->

<CoolingDeviceOrder>
        <!-- Specify Cooling device order -->
        <CoolingDevice>rapl_controller</CoolingDevice>
        <CoolingDevice>intel_pstate</CoolingDevice>
        <CoolingDevice>intel_powerclamp</CoolingDevice>
        <CoolingDevice>cpufreq</CoolingDevice>
        <CoolingDevice>Processor</CoolingDevice>
</CoolingDeviceOrder>

"""

I wouldn't consider the above file legally dubious.

After enabling thermald, it's definitely running:

$ rpm -q thermald
thermald-1.9.1-2.fc32.x86_64

$ systemctl status thermald
● thermald.service - Thermal Daemon Service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/thermald.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
     Active: active (running) since Tue 2020-06-30 13:01:50 EDT; 12min ago
   Main PID: 296760 (thermald)
      Tasks: 2 (limit: 18941)
     Memory: 2.5M
        CPU: 70ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/thermald.service
             └─296760 /usr/sbin/thermald --no-daemon --dbus-enable

--

Jared Dominguez (he/him)

Laptop/Desktop Hardware Enablement Manager

RHEL Workstation Engineering

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