On Thu, Sep 10, 2026 at 07:53:26AM +0200, Riccardo Mottola wrote: ... > However, it was an overheating issue. I did blow off some dust in the fan > and put the ThinkPad on a laptop stand and it did compile successfully > through 8 hours. > > No real "code" bugs. > > I would have expected in case of overheating to read something in dmesg, but > I didn't. Possibly it was just marginal and a memory bank or CPU cache > started acting. > > RIccardo ...
A few years ago, I started having problems too with large-ish builds (e.g., pkgsrc packages, build.sh) on one of my long time trustworthy NetBSD machines--a 2009-ish amd64 system with 4GB RAM. I don't remember which NetBSD version it had back then, but my guess would be 9.x. It turned out mine was a thermal issue as well, although it took me awhile to figure that out. At the time, I solved this by customizing various entries in /etc/powerd/scripts/sensor_temperature to dial down heat generation, such as "offline"-ing extra cores, or stopping "estd" & explicitly sysctl-ing CPU clock rate to the minimum--depending on the severity of the temp event--as temp increased; and progressively ratcheting back toward normal operation as temp decreased. This worked like a charm--props to the "powerd" implementation; and also made it interesting to watch the system's automated changes to CPU throttling in real time as powerd adapted to thermal issues. Then one morning several months ago, the machine had completely powered itself off, and it refused to turn back on at all. I eventually tracked this down to the CPU cooling fan, which had fully failed and needed to be replaced. For all I know, the fan's performance had probably been degrading for awhile, and could've caused the earlier thermal issues with builds. Anyway, I was grateful to powerd; it did a solid job of keeping my system stable all that time until the fan failure. Best, -D
