Hi all,

So I've recently installed Fedora 20 on my macbook air 2013 on an SSD partition (got the mba second hand recently with the sole intention of running a linux distro to use for my development work). I'm building a browser game in HTML5 canvas and liked the form factor of the air, in spite of it being Apple which I generally despise as a company. It's all gone pretty well on the whole, most stuff works out of the box, some grief installing wifi drivers as I've seen is the norm but that's sorted now, I've even got the suspend/resume backlight bug fixed thanks to a home-brewed driver by Patjak. Not bad for a linux noob!

One rather serious problem remains however. The macbook does idle quite hot in Fedora (and other flavours I've tried from live USB), but this isn't too bad. BUT as soon as I fire up any GPU intensive application, such as my browser game (or even just youtube videos) the laptop rapidly becomes worryingly hot. Within 30 seconds its up to 80 degrees C. I realise these devices have a high operating temperature, but in OS X the same applications run happily at 48 degrees C for many minutes without the temperature rising.

I'm at my wits' end trying to solve this problem, I've tried everything I've been able to find online:

> mbpfan - fan control - this works but doesn't dent the temp rises by much
> powertop - couldn't really figure this one out but I changed a few of the recommended settings with no luck
> thermald (intel thermal regulation daemon for linux) - seemingly does nothing
> cpupower - I set the CPU to max 1.5GHz with NO effect on the temp rises at all
> intel_pstate - various settings, disabling turbo boost - no effect on temperature
> nvidia drivers - tried installing but they couldn't find a device (presumably because it's an intel HD5000 GPU)

I'm out of ideas, it's fairly clear to me at this point that it must be the GPU causing these rises in temperature, but why they happen under linux and not OS X escapes me. I really don't want to have to use OS X, please if anyone has any advice to solve this, I will be eternally grateful!

It sounds like an acpi issue. I presume acpid is running. if not, make it so. I would get busy with 2 lesser known acpi programs, kacpimon, and acpi_listen. Both have man pages.