Overheating Issue on MacbookAir 6,2

Question

Its a horrible experience to use Freya on MacbookAir 6,2. I have tried many methods such as tlp, powersave, thermald and pstate enabling to minimize the heating issue. I finally found a better method: by adding

"chown -R $USER:$USER /sys/kernel/debug echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch"

to /etc/rc.local to reduce the GPU usage cased by vga switching. However, the GPU usage will be increase to 100% if I watch a video on youtube so that the laptop become hot again. If I watch the same video on OSX or windows, this problem doesn't exist.

In the other hand, the auto brightness adjustment of keyboard is not available and result in some power consumption. I tried lightum and it will cause the heating problem to be more serious. I then run it in the background by entering lightum -U in Terminal and the problem has been improved.

Is there any other solution for my problem? Or will this be solved in the next version? I really want to use this OS as my major working environment, but the heating issue must be solved so that my hardware and the power consumption can be saved.

Thank you.

Laptop model: Macbook Air 6,2 Graphic Card: Intel HD Graphics 5000

Answer 1

You should install TLP and Thermald

Be careful, TLP is NOT compatible with acpid or Laptop_mode_tools.

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One more tweak:

1. open a terminal and type

   • gksu gedit /etc/default/grub

2. then look for

   • GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=" "

3. and add

   • intel_pstate=enable

4. finally save and close gedit

5. after that write in the terminal:

   • sudo update-grub

6. Reboot and done.

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This will enable intel_pstate mode which works better than the default controller