Pentium_M/Troubleshooting

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This article is part of the Hardware series.

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1 Introduction
2 Technical
3 Providing information
4 tab

Introduction

I was talking with someone on the Gentoo forum about the pentiumM problems: several users have burned their laptop after hours of stage1 compilation, so, in order to prevent this to happen again we can do a database of all laptops that have succeeded and those who failed

Technical

I don't know what all to include in this tab (I only know how to do tabs roughly by copying them from another page) because I don't know where the problem comes from (I don't even have a Pentium-M or under-cooled laptop)...because a heat elevation in the case of the laptop can cause many failures with components that don't support such temperatures (that prevent them from properly dissipating the heat they create and so increase their temperature over the specifications.)

Maybe these failures aren't related to heat but some over-stressed components (with a reliability that has decreased because of heat?)

So we also need to figure out how these failures occurred in order to:

Maybe repair the notebook.
Provide the correct information.

Providing information

See the Technical section

There is also a tool: genlop

emerge genlop
emerge -p package | genlop -p

This tool can estimate the compilation time of a package using previous compilation time...so it can help for knowing the time your computer had passed compiling some huge packages

Maybe monitoring tools and scripts using them can also help...here to avoid such faillure

tab

Notebook brand and model	Processor	Ram	Stage and compilation	succeeded?	Ambient temperature/country
Acer Aspire 1694WLMI	Pentium-M 2.0GHz	1024MB	Stage1, Stage3	Several installations succeeded without problems. Did a stage1 installation about a year ago and a stage3 some says ago. Also compiled huge packages like KDE, OpenOffice and the like. The fan ran on the slower of two possible settings almost all the time.	20-25�C / Germany
Acer Travelmate 290LCi	Pentium-m 1.3GHz	512MB	Stage1, 6-8h per bootstrap, emerge system and a lot more	Success	20-25�C / Sweden
Acer TravelMate 3012WTMi	Core Duo 1.67GHz	512MB	Stage1, bootstrap and emerge system in succession using 2006.0 minimal liveCD	Success	~25�C / Finland
ASUS S200	Pentium M 800 MHz	256 MB	stage1, emerge system overnight	Success	~20 deg C / Russia
ASUS S5200Np	Pentium M 1600 MHz	768 MB	stage1	Success	~25 deg C / Russia
ASUS Z33A (M5A)	Pentium M 2.0 GHz	768 MB	Stage3.	Success. Set up acpi4asus, acpid, and cpufreq-utils immediately after first reboot. CPU temperature can get to 70-75�C at 2 GHz.	~25�C / Canada
COMPAQ Presario M2000	Pentium-M Centrino	512MB	Stage3, but all system recompiled with GCC 4.0.2	It took about 2 days and was succeeded	Country is Lithuania (who is Ambient Temperature?)
COMPAQ Evo N800w	Pentium 4-M 2.4GHz	1024MB	It works for over 2 years now with both Gentoo and WinXP, 3 displays and 2 HDDs failures.	gcc-4.1.1 merge time: 2h 36m 43s.	~25 deg C, Romania
Dell Inspiron 8600	Pentium-M 1.4GHz	512MB	Stage1, Xorg, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice	All went fine without any manual control. OpenOffice-2.0.1 compiled in 8 hours.	Cambridge, MA, USA.
Dell Inspiron 8600C	Pentium-M 1.6GHz	1024MB	Stage3, complete recompile after added use flags, Xorg, KDE, FireFox.	No problems encountered. Users of this model who have not already applied AS to the main CPU should do this. A ~20F drop is easily made. All I8xxx users should install i8kutils and i8krellm (from portage) for manual fan control.	Central Florida, USA. No AC. Ambient between 65F at night to 90F+ in day.
Dell Inspiron 1300	Celeron M 1.5Ghz	512MB	Stage3, Gnome, xfce4	Works fine, a little slow with gnome as its only got 8MB of video mem, took 2 days to compile everything.	Goldcoast, Australia. ~30C during the day, ~18C over the night
Dell Inspiron 8600	Pentium M 1.5GHz	512MB PC2700	Stage3, xorg, kde, openoffice, few more things. Then recompiled everything for GCC upgrade. Then again because I changed my CFLAGS. I can recompile everything in around 23 hours running at 1.5GHz.	Never had a problem. I have i8kutils installed and running all of the time. When the processor hits 60C, the fans go on high speed and it keeps the temperature pretty well capped to around 55C for the rest of the time. If things creep up a bit too high for comfort, I throttle it down to 25% and the temperature drops very quickly.	Edinburgh, UK, but at a room temperature of around 25-30C, depending on what my desktop is up to.
Dell Latitude C640	Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 - M CPU 1.80GHz	1 GB	Stage1: GCC 3.4.6, Glibc 2.4, XOrg 6.8.2, OOo 2.0.2	No probs.	Manchester, United Kindgom, min: 5c, Max: 15, Additional info: Cooler tray and internal fans running full blast throught the whole process (using i8kutils), MAX temp obtained while compiling 56c.
Dell Latitude C610	Pentium(R) M CPU 1.20GHz/800Mhz	256MB	Everything one can imagine :) (GCC 3.* and 4., glibc 2.6., xorg 7.2, OOo 2.3, qt, ...)	No problems. Some take quite a long time, but distcc helps. Without that - gcc ~10h at least. The Cpu temp never goes beyond 60C. BUT I did some cleaning of the laptop inner cooling system and put Arctic Silver 5 on the CPU - all before starting to compile the system.	Gda?sk, Poland. Temp: 10C - 20C
Dell Inspiron 1100	Celeron M 1.4ghz	Was 256MB (now 768MB)	Stage1, running ~x86 but sticking with gcc-3.4 rather than 4.x.	Just fine. I used distcc with Athlon 2100+, 2200+, and Sempron 2500+ backing it up though, so build time was much shorter than usual 8-).	USA. Like 30+ celsius outside, but the machine was in a 22C room. Cooling on this machine is more than adequate.. I put it in my bag once or twice still running 100% CPU usage, and (using remote X to check) CPU temp only maxes at 60C, then drops to 50-55.. case gets warm but not hot.
Dell Latitude D610	Pentium M 1.60 GHz	1 GB	Stage3, emerge world completed overnight (with source copied from another machine, so it was all compilation).	Success	~70 deg F / USA
Dell Latitude D800	Pentium M 1.70 GHz	512 MB	stage3 + emerge -e system, GCC 3.4.5, KDE 3.5.2, OpenOffice 2.0.2	Everything went fine.	~ 20 �C - Belgium
HP Pavilion dv4000	Pentium-M 2.0 GHz	512 MB	stage3 (gcc in 2005.1); OOo 2.0.2 (gcc 3.4.6)	No problems	~77� F, MD, USA; ~20� C Lithuania, Europe ;)
Dell Precision M70	Pentium M 1.7 GHz	1024 MB DDR	stage1 on a stage3 tarball (toolchain, two "emerge -e system"s, xorg, kde, OOo 2) in about a day and a half	no problems	74� F, NJ, USA;
Samsung P35	Pentium M 1,6 GHz	512 MB DDR	Stage3 xorg, kde, openoffice and a lot of audio stuff, gcc 3.4.5 recompiled due to a gcc-update and new CFLAGS (-march=pentium-m -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -O2)	The 3rd time I need to do that, it took about 3 days with powermanagement, cpufreq "on demand" enabled. No problems during compilation even without powermanagement (the first two times of "system" and "world" recpompilation were without any powermanagement)	Hamburg, Germany, room temperature of around 20� C
Samsung Q30plus	Pentium M 1100 MHz	512 MB	Stage3 + a couple of days compiling	Success	~20C / UK
Samsung X20 XVM 1730 V	Pentium M 1730 MHz	1024 MB	Stage2, kde, firefox, media-players, kdevelop	Compiled about 4 to 6 hours per day. (~5 Days)	~20C / DE
Toshiba Dynabook TX/2513CWSB	Celeron-M 1.3G	256MB	Stage1 from 3 {Jackass method}, Xorg, Enlightenment, OpenOffice, other apps	It all went fine. I manually turned on the fan with the toshiba fan util. Took >36hrs.	Beltana, Australia. ~36C during the day, ~18C over the night
Toshiba Portege R100	Pentium-M ULV 1ghz	1280 MB, PC2700	Stage3, then KDE packages	"emerge kde" took about 3 days straight. No errors though	Atlanta, GA ambient 70F in apartment complex
Toshiba Satellite A105-4001	Core Solo 1.66 (PentiumM Derivative)	512 MB, PC5200	Stage1, optimized "-march=pentium-m -msse -msse2 -msse3 -ffpmath=sse,387". Used graphical installer.	Compile failed at GCC. Machine froze and when rebooted, graphics card was dead.	Columbus, OH. USA. Room temp: ~24-27C (75-80F), Yes, I know, dumb me for doing it in these temps.
Toshiba Satellite M30-801	Pentium-M 1.5 GHz (Banias)	512 MB	Stage1, optimized cflags pentium-m, basic flags for X, KDE	No problems, the system was downlclocked to 600 MHz, it took 3 days to compile	room temperature
Toshiba Satellite M45-165S	Celeron M 1.5 GHz	1 GB	Stage1: GCC 4.0.3, Glibc 2.4, XOrg 7.0, GNOME 2.14.1	No problems.	40-50�F/ Bothell, Washington, USA
Toshiba Tecra A3	Pentium-m 1.6GHz	512Mb	Stage1, gcc 4.1 - takes a while but any gentoo install does.	No problems except for needing to coax a few ebuilds through the install process (gcc 4.1 issues).	About 20 deg. Yes it's cold outside here in Stockholm but my laptop stays inside.
Compal Hel80	Core Duo 2.0Ghz	2 GB	Stage3, upgrade gcc & emerge system	No Problems	About 27 degrees. Estonia.
HP nx6110	Intel Celeron M 1.4 GHz	512 Mb	Stage1, gcc 4.1	No problems, on boot from LiveCD there's need to add acpi=on, in other case it will switch off.	Lodz, Poland Max. ~30�C in summer but doesn't matter.
Gateway M320S	Intel Pentium M 1.5 Ghz (Centrino)	768 Mb	Stage3, gcc, xorg, gnome	Took approx. 1.5 days, and it actually turned off once due to overheating. Compile time temp. = 82+ �C.	Ambient temp. = 22�C
Maxdata Pro 7000 DX	Intel Pentium M 1.6 Ghz (Centrino)	512 MB	minimal cd install, xorg, xfce4	Took approx. 2 days, no problem of any sort. I am not sure but I'd say that it was running at 600 MhZ the first time I compiled (possibly due to bad kernel configuration through genkernel?), I was (ans still am) a newbie. Further massive recompilations (done at least weekly) do not show any problem so far. The temperature does not get over 50 �C. I found that if you put a (paper) notebook under the laptop, not under the fan, the fan will turn on less frequently (will favour air circulation).	Summer of 2007 in Rome and even in Sicily = very hot!