Overheating Issue with FreeBSD on PowerBook G4 6,4

[bsdppc]

Greetings,

After a quarter-century hiatus, I'm back to BSD and hoping to make use of an old PowerBook G4 6,4 (12" 1.33GHz 1.25GB) to experiment with the various BSDs before picking one and putting it to work. I threw out the HDD and replaced it with an IDE - mSATA adapter and a pair of 60GB mSATA SSDs. I managed to get OpenBSD installed and working fine on one of the drives. Not having the same amount of luck with FreeBSD, I'm afraid.

Around 60 to 80 seconds after booting I get the following error message displayed on the console:

WARNING: Current temperature (GPU ON DIE: 103.0 C) exceeds critical temperature (80.0 C); count=1

The warning repeats every 20 seconds or so with the count increasing. At no point in time since pressing the power button has the fan spun up.

Everything I ever knew about BSD has pretty-much been forgotten, so I'm effectively starting from scratch. (Been on Linux and MacOS in the intervening years.) I'm thoroughly perplexed why the GPU is overheating, considering I've got a virgin install, nothing running, and am just staring at a console.

I'm hoping someone can suggest a strategy for overcoming this problem. If I had time I'm confident I could work this thing out, but I can't get anything useful done in 60s before I'm compelled to shut down the system for fear of doing permanent damage to it. So at this point I'm hoping there might be some sort of way to, perhaps, use Open Firmware to force the fans ON. Then I could get networking up and running, maybe configure powerd or otherwise find out what software I need to install/configure, and then back out the OF changes and let the OS handle the fan. Or something like that.

Since OpenBSD works, I'm sure this problem is soluble. Just need to get over this first hurdle.

Any suggestions?

 

[B S Magnet]

Before anything else, the first thing I would want to do with old gear is to thoroughly clean out the original thermal pads and pastes and apply a clean, new thermal paste of good quality, such as an Arctic Silver or a Noctua. This, in itself, won’t address the lack of the fan spinning up due to possible software or firmware issues, but it will dissipate heat into the heatsink far more efficiently than what is probably crumbly, hard OEM thermal paste/pads on the CPU, GPU, and memory controller dating back to 2004.

 

[ervus]

In terms of strategy, it seems like you would want to know if it's actually overheating or you're just getting the error message. You could boot it up on OS X and run temperature monitor and see if that also reports a high temperature. If it is overheating, it could be a stuck fan, disconnected fan, problem with the heatsink, etc. There are some existing threads on the 12" powerbooks related to this, like this one:

PowerBook G4 12" Maintenance/Servicing

Hi everyone, I was wondering if there's any need for maintaining/servicing a PowerBook G4 in order to extend its lifespan? I've just started using mine again after a year – works fine, but I'm concerned that I'll run it into the ground, as I plan on using it much more than I did previously. I...

forums.macrumors.com

The broken solder joint is a known problem on the 12. Good luck and let us know what you come up with!

 

[barracuda156]

Greetings,

After a quarter-century hiatus, I'm back to BSD and hoping to make use of an old PowerBook G4 6,4 (12" 1.33GHz 1.25GB) to experiment with the various BSDs before picking one and putting it to work. I threw out the HDD and replaced it with an IDE - mSATA adapter and a pair of 60GB mSATA SSDs. I managed to get OpenBSD installed and working fine on one of the drives. Not having the same amount of luck with FreeBSD, I'm afraid.

Around 60 to 80 seconds after booting I get the following error message displayed on the console:

WARNING: Current temperature (GPU ON DIE: 103.0 C) exceeds critical temperature (80.0 C); count=1

The warning repeats every 20 seconds or so with the count increasing. At no point in time since pressing the power button has the fan spun up.

Everything I ever knew about BSD has pretty-much been forgotten, so I'm effectively starting from scratch. (Been on Linux and MacOS in the intervening years.) I'm thoroughly perplexed why the GPU is overheating, considering I've got a virgin install, nothing running, and am just staring at a console.

I'm hoping someone can suggest a strategy for overcoming this problem. If I had time I'm confident I could work this thing out, but I can't get anything useful done in 60s before I'm compelled to shut down the system for fear of doing permanent damage to it. So at this point I'm hoping there might be some sort of way to, perhaps, use Open Firmware to force the fans ON. Then I could get networking up and running, maybe configure powerd or otherwise find out what software I need to install/configure, and then back out the OF changes and let the OS handle the fan. Or something like that.

Since OpenBSD works, I'm sure this problem is soluble. Just need to get over this first hurdle.

Any suggestions?

Any update on the matter?

Besides, how did you install it? I just saw this link where someone can’t make it on a PowerBook: http://tingo.homedns.org/machines/apple_powerbook_g4/freebsd/