I am using ASUS 1005HA for light web browsing, but recently I experienced CPU fan failure. It’s hard to get a new fan when most people celebrate Christmas. Hopefully, there is a solution that will give me some time.

At first I can hear that fan is failing and logs proves it:

Dec 24 15:54:51 milosz-1005HA kernel: [53200.537194] Critical temperature reached (89 C), shutting down.

The system will slow down noticeably when CPU temperature reaches 85’C and shuts itself down at 88’C.

# acpi -V
Battery 0: Discharging, 92%, 07:36:54 remaining
Battery 0: design capacity 5800 mAh, last full capacity 5408 mAh = 93%
Adapter 0: off-line
Thermal 0: ok, 54.0 degrees C
Thermal 0: trip point 0 switches to mode critical at temperature 88.0 degrees C
Thermal 0: trip point 1 switches to mode passive at temperature 85.0 degrees C
Cooling 0: LCD 0 of 15
Cooling 1: Processor 0 of 10
Cooling 2: Processor 0 of 10

To change these values we need to edit grub configuration:

$ sudo vim /etc/grub.d/10_linux

Search for GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT around line 70:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="$GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT vt.handoff=7"

Modify it in similar way (thermal.psv is a passive temperature and thermal.crt is a critical temperature):

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="$GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT thermal.psv=75 thermal.crt=100 vt.handoff=7"

Update grub and reboot system:

$ sudo update-grub2
$ sudo reboot

Now you can check modifications:

$ acpi -V
Battery 0: Discharging, 91%, 07:00:05 remaining
Battery 0: design capacity 5800 mAh, last full capacity 5408 mAh = 93%
Adapter 0: off-line
Thermal 0: ok, 63.0 degrees C
Thermal 0: trip point 0 switches to mode critical at temperature 100.0 degrees C
Thermal 0: trip point 1 switches to mode passive at temperature 75.0 degrees C
Cooling 0: LCD 0 of 15
Cooling 1: Processor 0 of 10
Cooling 2: Processor 0 of 10

It won’t make the problem go away but there is a chance that at least it will work for a couple of days.