For the last couple of days, my home computer with SolydXK was overheating. The situation was so bad that, by the time I can gain control of the machine, it gets so overheated that it shuts down automatically as the critical temperatures have reached.
I initially suspected acpi_call (just a hunch, because I have set up the OS on this machine quite recently and haven't tweaked the system much yet, except turning off the discrete graphics card using acpi_call). But removing the corresponding kernel module didn't do the trick. I booted into recovery mode, edited the /etc/rc.local to prevent loading the acpi_call kernel module and turning off the discrete graphics card. Although this sounds counter intuitive, because usually turning on the discrete graphics card causes the overheating, I saw some errors related to acpi_call during boot time too, which is why I targeted that first.
But a reboot after exiting the recovery mode, now without acpi_call loaded, didn't prevent the laptop from overheating. So, I tried to chase my second suspect. Before the system would go down again reaching the critical temperature, I quickly ran apt upgrade, suspecting that some unstable package might be messing up the system. While running the upgrade, I also checked "top" as a sanity check (looking for a third suspect). The apt upgrade appeared to have upgraded some causual packages such as mendeley etc. It is the top result in which I found the culprit: a process called freshclam, running at 100%. I slaughtered it immediately (sudo killall freshclam). Result immediately showed up; the temperature slowly started to reduce. The next cpu hungry process in the race was dropbox. I killed it too. The computer became sane again (well, I could have safely spared dropbox, but I didn't want to take any chance at all :-P).
I googled to find out what freshclam process was. The freshclam process was part of the clamav antivirus software!. It must have bundled in the default SolydXK distro. As I never previously used any antivirus software on any of my linux systems, I didn't see an immediate need for it now. So, I removed the clamav software for now (sudo apt purge clamav clamav-freshclam; there was a third package too, whose name probably was clamav-common).
After this, everything was good. So, I re-enabled the acpi_call and turning off the discrete graphics card, by uncommenting those lines in /etc/rc.local. Everything has been running smooth ever since.
Alternative title: proposal for a health care project. Diseases such as hypertension (high blood pressure), diabetes, obesity are becoming so common nowadays. It is hard to find people with no diseases. The lifestyle is certainly to be blamed. But what is the use if we just shut our mouth after finding the right thing to blame? Or how would I be different if I leave it there. So, here is a proposal for an automatic health-care system. Well, I know there maybe some treatments, but the idea here is to prevent the diseases. But, prevention really demands prediction of the disease occurrance much before the disease symptoms show off. But, since I am not a palmist or an astrologist, my proposal is to develop a method to stop the disease as soon as its onset or the symptoms appear. OK... it will become more clear as I go with the concrete examples. I would like to concentrate on hypertension and diabetes, because they appear to be the most common diseases. As most of you know, the best cure...
Comments