Comment 202 for bug 370173

@Michael -- indeed the T30 is not very powerful, but the other has a top of the range dual core cpu in it. The fact is there is an underlying trigger which only affects a small subset of users. That is how this bug got released in the first place, you can be sure if it was routinely hitting any of the development teams during the release cycle we would have known about it much sooner. As for your fix I am glad you have a way to keep working, but that is a work around which can only work on a small subset of machines, it is not a solution to the underlying issue either for you or anyone else.

In the majority of the reported cases we are not meant to have any control or intervention in the fan control. We rely on the BIOS setup for these components and there is no software component in the monitoring of temperature nor in the control of the fan speed in response. It is therefore very hard to identify what has changed in the kernel to trigger this change in behaviour. Clearly there is a kernel component or interaction triggering the issue as only changing the kernel changes the bahaviour. The tests I have requested would help us eliminate some of the kernel delta which is suspected as triggering the issue (the difference between v2.6.27 and v2.6.28).