hp pavilion g6 high temp and AMD GPU

johnjohn

johnjohn

where to start? i've been using FreeBSD in VirtualBox on Windows 10. I'm a FreeBSD newbie. I decided to install FreeBSD on an actual system today.

I have an old HP Pavilion G6 laptop/notebook that i bought for my Mother-in-law. The laptop is from circa 2013? The laptop was burning hot one day circa 2016?. I shutdown the system quickly and yanked the power cable. The battery was extremely hot, so i removed it from the laptop. Turns out that this HP had a battery catching on fire problem. Lots of people had this problem. The system has been sitting around collecting dust. I guess that i managed to save the system from total damage but the keyboard and touchpad no longer function.

I decided to try to resurrect this system and install FreeBSD. I see that FreeBSD is reporting that the temperature is absurd (255.1 Celsius, if i am interpreting this message correctly.) see attached image of macro photo of the screen with this message. I am not a system temp or hardware specialist. Is there something i can do to drop the temp? or is this system unusable as it is?

Besides that, i notice that the archive extraction graphics are a bit messed up (also viewable in the screen photo image attachment). I have not seen this overlapping output in VirtualBox, so i wonder if it is a known issue or if it is also related to the temps?

FreeBSD installs and i've attached a photo to show the boot screen. I've already configured ethernet and installed pkg. I am having trouble with the Trinity 2 Radeon 7420G graphics. I have tried drm-515-kmod but xorg will not start. I removed 515 because of posts in this foru about it being unstable, so i tried drm-61-kmod and the system crashed during boot. I suppose that i should try drm-kmod instead? Anyone have recommendations about the Radeon 7420G driver? or maybe the temps are too high and this problem cnnot be resolved, so let it go?

Thanks for reading ...
 

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johnjohn said:
The system has been sitting around collecting dust.
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Sitting around does not collect as much dust as when it's used, because of the fans sucking in air.

Your pictures show messages due installation process, and the start screen, so say nothing about the situation while usage, plus especially the first pic shows you already get temp probs while installation, I presume your machine has hardware issues.

My first recommendation was: (carefully) open the laptop (in most cases just the bottom needs to be removed), take one of those compressed air dust cleaner aerosol cans, blow the dust out of all fans, cooling radiators, chill slots, and try again.
Depending on the environment (textiles like in the living room, or worse bed room, or if the user is/was a smoker) after some years already some heatsinks seem more like a vacuum cleaner's dust filter bag than a cooling device. 😅

Touch to test if the battery cells are getting hot (slightly warm is normal).
If the battery once was too hot, and so gets every usage, again, especially while charging, it's a sign it's damaged. When it takes >12...14h to be fully charged, and then it's depleted within <20 minutes, it's toast anyway.
Then you're well adviced not to use it anymore. Either get a replacement for it, or use the laptop without the battery, wired only.
 
johnjohn said:
I see that FreeBSD is reporting that the temperature is absurd (255.1 Celsius, if i am interpreting this message correctly.) see attached image of macro photo of the screen with this message. I am not a system temp or hardware specialist. Is there something i can do to drop the temp? or is this system unusable as it is?
Click to expand...
That only means that ACPI reports absurd temperature that simply can't be. Check if there's a BIOS update.
johnjohn said:
Besides that, i notice that the archive extraction graphics are a bit messed up (also viewable in the screen photo image attachment). I have not seen this overlapping output in VirtualBox, so i wonder if it is a known issue or if it is also related to the temps?
Click to expand...
That happens because of the kernel messages printed to the same virtual terminal as the installer, nothing to worry about (though I find it really annoying, see that a lot with different hardware).
 
Also, thermal paste (between CPU and attached cooler for example) tends to be less efficient after a number of years. Might be good for 3 - 5 years, but after that I would disassemble and apply new thermal paste if the machine in question is having temperature problems (which is different from the ACPI showing wrong values).
 
astyle Hello and i hope that you are doing well. I do not know the exact identification of every component in this system (or any other that i own) because manufacturers always display one thing and system info programs from developers display something completely different. For example, i never see any info about generation of an Intel processor coming from my system with any command that i type. I always have to search Intel for processor name (written in manual and on pc sticker), then i can figure out the so-called generation. LOL. Piss poor specs if you ask me. I shouldn't have to research this info but i always end up researching.

The only thing displayed on this Pavilion G6 is AMD A4 Vision (really helpful AMD, lol). Tech companies are so goofy.

So you are saying that this graphics device at vgapci0 is Aruba radeon? okay, but FreeBSD system reports that it is a Trinity 2. see my attached photo, which also fortifie the game-playing that i mentioned above. Sometimes it feels like end users are supossed to hire pc detectives to find this info. According to FreeBSD: I have a Trinity 2 radeon HD 7420G vgapci device.
attached photo: pciconf-lv

Maturin "sitting around collecting dust" is merely an expression to convey that the system is not being used for many years now.

cyric I thought about checking for a BIOS update but i have yet to do so. Thank you for reminding me :) I will do this sometime today. Regarding the extraction screen: A bit sloppy here and ignoring it as a user is one thing but as a developer it is a cry for better code.

tingo Thank you :) I will get some thermal paste and see if it helps. keep reading for more info...

@ everyone
So today i decided to disassemble this laptop. I removed everything, then cleaned the fan. I reassembled the system and it is currently booted. I am fighting with xorg and graphics currently. The acpi tz0 crt absurd message is still showing but the fan is more quiet :) I will look for any BIOS updates from HP.

I have followed the handbook for installing graphics drivers. Today i have installed drm-kmod and if i run kldload /boot/modules/radeonkms.ko the screen goes black for a few seconds, then system reports that the driver is loaded. xinit still complains about no screens found. startxfce4 returns "-sh: startxfce4: not found"

I'm having trouble getting graphics to work but the system is installed and running. I will keep tinkering with it to see if i can get xorg to load but so far it complains about not finding any screens.
 

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johnjohn said:
Regarding the extraction screen: A bit sloppy here and ignoring it as a user is one thing but as a developer it is a cry for better code.
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It's not about the code, the expectation here is that kernel would have printed all its messages by the time installer starts, but as reality shows it's not always true - it's acpi warning for you, for me it was ~80 disks information printed to console as the hba initialization took too long. Looking at the device_printf(), all the way down to prf_putbuf(), it looks like these messages are always printed to console (i.e. tweaking syslog.conf won't help) unless kern.consmute is set to 1 -- that could be done in the installer to help with such unwanted (?) output that breaks TUI.
 
My GPU is listed as 'Barcelo', while it in fact uses Green Sardine firmware. And I have KDE 6 running fine.

Try running /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb, followed by locate radeonkms.
 
cyric it is nice to know that you have seen this before. I feel better because it means that it isn't something specific to me and this laptop, besides the obvious. Anyway, i don't care about that message, so all is good :)

meantime, i found another person with an HP acpi_tz0 problem, which is very interesting: http://wp.xin.at/archives/5312

astyle i cannot get the graphics card driver working. xorg will not start. I'm tired. I have spent a day and a half on this. I'm convinced that this system is not supported by FreeBSD drivers. I decided to upgrade the system to the new 14.3 RELEASE to see if it makes a difference. Now i get errors when trying to kldload radeonkms. I see the file in /boot/modules but i just cannot get this driver working. I started make install on the drm-515-kmod but i would like to relax sometime today. I've put in alot of work and i have to say that if i download Linux Mint and install it on this system, i would've been looking at a full Cinnamon Desktop by now.

I wanted to resurrect this old system because my 9 year old son always sees me tinkering with FreeBSD in VirtualBox and he asked if he could have it too. I figure why not? so i wanted to install it on this old system but it isn't going very well with graphics. I will try something tomorrow but i will give up if i cannot find a resolution soon. I'll just put Mint on it for him and let him play with FreeBSD in VirtualBox.
 

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I'd say, install 14.3-RELEASE from scratch, and compile your way into Xorg, complete wth drm-kmod. Some things are not explicitly specified as dependencies, true, but they are important to have nonetheless.

At the very least, try to install or compile graphics/gpu-firmware-radeon-kmod. No pressure to do it now when you're tired. Get a good night's sleep, you can't underestimate the impact that will have on your ability to think straight.

I know for a fact that FreeBSD does have the drivers for the system's hardware. I got Xorg running on older and weirder hardware than that.
 
astyle Thank you for taking time to help out. I appreciate you. I hope that you are having a nice day :)

I have tried several times to get this working but it fails. xorg will not start. I am okay with t, the system is old and i just wanted to see if i could get FreeBSD working on it. I've done some research and i see that the system is not listed as compatible. Some things work and others are listed as detected only. The Radeon HD 7420 i listed only as detected for FreeBSD.

I decided to install Mint, which has out-of-the-box support for this system. I installed 14.3 in VirtualBox. Now my son can play with FreeBSD and also learn Linux at the same time. I encourage him to learn, so i am happy. Also, Linux doesn't show the acpi_tz0 _CRT absurd temperature message, so it works out well.

I've made a photo of the Mint/FreeBSD setup using my 1:1 macro lens (blacked out his name, of course).
 

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