System freezes, dmesg spammed, overheating laptop

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄]

Running LTS 14.04 on my X220 in a docking station. Frequently the laptop freezes up for extended periods. Sometimes I get a couple of keypresses in but often it's frozen for nearly a minute before I can do anything.

Typically afterwards I can look in dmesg and see the cpu overheating (I've previously had the fan replaced, and very recently had the laptop apart to clean dust out). The syslog is also being spammed with:-

[169246.385121] powercap intel-rapl:0: package locked by BIOS, monitoring only

http://paste.ubuntu.com/15568114/ is my dmesg

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: linux-image-4.2.0-34-generic 4.2.0-34.39~14.04.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.2.0-34.39~14.04.1-generic 4.2.8-ckt4
Uname: Linux 4.2.0-34-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.19
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Thu Mar 31 15:30:21 2016
InstallationDate: Installed on 2015-12-23 (98 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Beta amd64 (20150805)
SourcePackage: linux-lts-wily
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to trusty on 2016-01-28 (62 days ago)

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

Can you also run:

cpustat 1 60 -T > cpustat.log

and attach the log to the bug report.

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

The BIOS spamming messages:

..were fixed with commits

https://github.com/01org/thermal_daemon/commit/f1a77c5f3b936ba8a7a63d587a803641974f8e62
https://github.com/01org/thermal_daemon/commit/c0ab60a102e6ed5c2be66cdd0286fb4a924affbd

..but not yet applied to thermald in Wily because we're still waiting for bug 1480349 to be verified and released. I'll pop these fixed into a PPA build later today for testing.

I've tried to reproduce the issue, I believe you have an Intel i7 CPU and chrome is sucking all the life out if the CPU and the thermal zone controls are introducing thermal injections to slow down the CPU from overheating. If you temporarily stop thermald then lets see if you machine actually overheats to see if thermald is being overly pedantic. To stop thermald use:

sudo systemctl stop thermald

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

I've uploaded a fix to the dmesg spamming, you can find a test package in:

ppa:colin-king/thermald-1564443

install with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:colin-king/thermald-1564443
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall thermald

It should be ready to try out by 14:30pm

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey)]

I can't install that on my 14.04 system.

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

Oops, I'll re-spin that for 14.04, my bad

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

thermald (1.4.3-5~14.04.3) is ready now in the ppa for testing. please let me know if the log spamming is fixed

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

Any updates? If not, I'll close this bug in 4 weeks