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SolydXK linux laptop overheating

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.

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