Scrambled Elf Brains

[elfs]

After dinner, I sat Yamaarashi-chan down and made her read for 20 minutes, as her class assignment requires. She tried making it difficult by picking out three books that had almost no words, but I finally got her to read a Stuart Little adaptation that was lying around the house, as well as Baloney (Henry P.), which is a fun little exercise. Kouryou-chan read off in her corner, and everything was good.

The desktop threw more fits. I tinkered with it. I'm running another stress test right now. I don't think the on-board sensors are trustworthy: they're reporting that the CPU temperature is 101C, but the motheboard is only 37C. That can't be right; I suspect the raw-to-human-readable algorithms are screwed. I'm not running the sensors inside the hard-drives; I'm taking a definite don't monkey with it attitude.

Kouryou-chan, for being so brave during her blood draw, got a coupon good for a free ice cream cone down at Baskin Robbins, so I took the girls there. They both ate daquiri sherberts; I had a single scoop of blueberry cheesecake icecream.

By the time I got home, Kouryou-chan had fallen asleep in the car. I tucked her in. I'm going to do some housework and head to bed myself.

Comments

[voidrandom.livejournal.com]

A temperature differential like that isn't impossible if you assume the problem is a CPU heatsink/fan issue. I'd check that, particularly the thermal conductor between the CPU and the heatsink. These days it's unlikely to be the problem but it's an easy one to check.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I installed it myself, so it's very possible. My confusion was that the BIOS and the lm-sensors were reporting different values; the BIOS will automatically send a hard shut-down if the CPU exceeds 85 degrees anyway, and I've programmed the kernel to listen for that.

I updated my copy of lm-sensors, and it now agrees with the BIOS with respect to temperature. It has weird ideas about what my various voltages should be-- and they're all low enough that lm-sensors is putting up ALARM message everywhere. But the BIOS says it's all within operating parameters.

*Sigh* Why can't hardware be easy? It's always hardware.

[voidrandom.livejournal.com]

Ah, now I see...Yeah, the BIOS is probably correct, assuming a recent BIOS revision. I haven't looked at lm-sensors in a while but I seem to recall calibration problems if the hardware was even slightly uncommon. If you're lucky maybe the motherboard vendor makes some calibration information available, othewise it's off to /etc/sensors.conf with you.

Of course it's always hardware...that's because you're a software guy...if you were an electrical engineer you'd be getting random buffer overflows and video driver crashes. Some days I think the Animists have it right...

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Would I be wrong were I to think that it would be worthwhile checking PSU output -- voltages "wrong" and a temperature sensor error do seem to have a potential connection...

(covers face with paw)

"Potential connection" -- I didn't mean that...

Thing is, I don't know how these particular bits work, but I do know that some hardware does depend on getting a correct voltage to a sensor.

OK, so the hardware is my Land Rover.

[quaryn-dk.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, I loved Daquiri Ice as a kid. I tried it again as an adult when I moved to a town that had Baskin-Robbins again, and it was still awesome. Your daughters obviously have good taste. :)