Linux CPU Scaling Governor – Performance and Overheating

On my previous laptop I suffered with repeated over-heating problems whenever CPU load went high for a prolonged period. After several emergency shutdowns (performed by ACPI) I discovered the problem:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

returned the result: “performance”

Inserting the following line before the ‘exit’ line in /etc/rc.local:

echo "conservative" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

resolved the problem.

For all available scaling governors:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors