Comment 0 for bug 570589

As you know the code in Lucid's -32 kernel doesn't have support for power management on ATI cards with KMS (which is default). This is not a problem for desktop users, but laptop users with beefy cards may run into severe overheating issues. I expect the forums to flood with these problems once lucid is final. I have experienced this on two (laptop) machines at home: GPU and CPU share a heatsink thus the CPU gets very hot too when idling. In one case this lead to the CPU (both are C2Ds) being constantly stuck at 800 MHz a few minutes after booting (Once it went over 75° or something like that), in the other case the CPU temps went up to 80° in idle even with the fans at full speed. Switching to fglrx OR a newer kernel and PM OR UMS and PM fixes this, but I feel KMS on ATI as a default is a bad decision right now. I hope this gets fixed with 10.10 as the PM code hits MMs kernel.

Most likely we won't be able to do anything about this bug (unless there's a kernel upgrade in one of lucid's point releases) so I guess the purpose of this bugreport is more or less to track this issue during the development of MM.