thermald is a Linux daemon used to prevent the overheating of platforms. This daemon monitors temperature and applies compensation using available cooling methods.
By default, it monitors CPU temperature using available CPU digital temperature sensors and maintains CPU temperature under control, before HW takes aggressive correction action.
Thermal daemon looks for thermal sensors and thermal cooling drivers in the Linux thermal sysfs (/sys/class/thermal) and builds a list of sensors and cooling drivers. Each of the thermal sensors can optionally be binded to a cooling driver by the in kernel drivers. In this case the Linux kernel thermal core can directly take actions based on the temperature trip points, for each sensor and associated cooling device. For example a trip temperature X in a sensor can be associates a cooling driver Y. So when the sensor temperature = X, the cooling driver “Y” is activated.
Thermal daemon allows one to change this relationship or add new one via a thermal configuration file (thermal-conf.xml). This file is automatically created (thermal-conf.xml.auto) and used, if the platform has ACPI thermal relationship table. If not this needs to be manually configured.
It focuses on allowing maximum performance based on a “maximum temperature” for the system.
Bear in mind, thermald only works on Intel CPUs.
This is free and open source software.
Website: github.com/intel/thermal_daemon
Support:
Developer: Intel
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
thermald is written in C++ and C. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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