Comment 13 for bug 1600599

> This is upto you what you want to do with your system.

Yet the current behavior is objectively wrong. The system is becoming unusable because of the amount of CPU throttling, and this is totally avoidable, so it's taking a suboptimal decision.

> Don't judge system heat with Fan speed.

I'm not judging system heat with Fan speed. I'm judging what I can observe: fan speed and CPU throttling.

If system performance degrades and fan speed never goes anywhere near its full capacity, it means one of two things (theoretically):
a) thermald could use more fan power and reduce or even eliminate the need for CPU throttling. Hence it's making the wrong decision
b) thermald is actually right: using more fan alone would be too risky as the temperature could increase

Now (b) already makes little sense, because if that was the case, then the fan should already be close to its maximum speed (by definition, if it's not at its full capacity there's unused cooling power there). But let's say for the sake of argument that temperature can vary too quickly and the cooling effect of the fan takes time, so that would be risky.

So I run this little experiment: I shut down thermald and keep CPU consumption steadily high as it was; actually, I increase it by playing half a dozen youtube videos at once (when one alone was enough to make the system unusable with thermald running).

If your hypothesis (b) were right, then now I would by definition be in a situation where the temperature cannot be kept safe (otherwise there would be no reason why thermald was throttling the CPU in the first place). Hence two things should happen: first, the fan speed actually should go crazy, because it is now the ONLY cooling device available. Then, at a certain point the system would shut down (or some internal hardware protection, if it exists, would slow down the CPU itself and I'd observe a system slowdown similar to that caused by powerclamp).

NEITHER happens: the fan speed does go up a little bit, but not much. While I cannot deduce temperature from that, I can tell for sure that the temperature is not steadily growing if the fan speed isn't, and that the temperature is not critical if the fan is not at its maximum speed.

I can, and I will, run all the debugs and provide the logs, so you can put numbers to all of this, and that will certainly be valuable information to fix the issue. But the facts are already there to prove that the current behavior is WRONG, you don't need any log for that.