Lately I have been getting a hard lockup on a work laptop, and I suspect it may be temperature related. Unfortunately with the latest Karmic kernel (2.6.31-17-generic x86_64) I am seeing the following message on boot:
[ 0.943491] ACPI Exception: AE_OK, No or invalid critical threshold 20090521 thermal-384
Additionally, there is no output reported from
# acpi -t
I am running the F.37 BIOS update, noting that some older BIOSes has some known issues around reporting thermal information and that there were some previously resolved kernel bugs related to dv5z thermal reporting that have been resolved.
The fix/workaround turned out to be a simple modification to my kernel command line. I modified my /etc/default/grub to include acpi_osi=Linux. It now looks like the following:
# This file is sourced by update-grub, and its variables are propagated
# to its children in /etc/grub.d/
GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
#Removed quiet, added usbcore.autosuspend for Blackberry and acpi_osi for Thermal Zones
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="splash usbcore.autosuspend=0 acpi_osi=Linux"
# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console
# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true
After executing a #update-grub and rebooting, I now see thermal information,
imac@laptop:~$ acpi -t
Thermal 0: ok, 74.0 degrees C
Damm, this thing runs hot 
_ 74.0 nearly idle _ Yikes.
