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The control loop is handled by the OS? What if the (relatively complex and therefore much more likely to crash) OS crashes? Why would there not at least be some
by Arch-TK 2y ago
The control loop is handled by the OS? What if the (relatively complex and therefore much more likely to crash) OS crashes? Why would there not at least be some kind of basic thermal throttling implemented in hardware as a fallback? Oh wait, it's Apple, never mind.
- userbinator 2y agoIn the late 2000s I remember hearing of PC laptops which if left in the BIOS setup would overheat and shut down due to the fan control being exclusively done by OS drivers, so this sort of "planned fragility" isn't exclusive to Apple.
- ranger_danger 2y agoHow do you know it was intentional?
- userbinator 2y agoNo one thinks "let the fans stay off and overheat" is a good idea unless they were convinced to do that against their common sense. Other manufacturers' models either had the expected automatic fan control via EC firmware, or defaulted to the fans being on some intermediate speed.
- Narishma 2y agoI had one such laptop. It was always a crapshoot whether Windows updates (the big ones where it rebooted one or more times) would succeed or not before the laptop overheated and shut down. The reason was that the BIOS didn't do any power management and would always run the CPU at maximum power with the fans blowing like a jet engine. It was only once Windows (or Linux) was fully booted that they would take over and do proper power management. But the Windows updates were so slow that they would often spend too much time in that pre-boot environment leading to overheating and shutdown.
- Arch-TK 2y agoIt's not the late 2000s anymore, this is a flagship product.
- kccqzy 2y agoIt's managed by the Linux kernel communicating with a user space daemon (speakersafetyd). If the user land crashes or if the user space daemon is too slow the kernel can still fall back to a ridiculously low limit that will not damage the speakers for any audio. If the kernel crashes, well you get no audio in that case. IIRC the reason they couldn't do it completely in the kernel was because the temperature model uses floating point which is not allowed in the kernel.
- userbinator 2y agoIf the kernel crashes, well you get no audio in that case. More likely to be repeating audio, whatever was last in the buffer.
- wbl 2y agoA floating to fixed conversion is possible but would take some painstaking numerical analysis.