Using Haiku on my System76 Oryx Pro, the laptop gets rather hot, even when barely using it. Using an infared thermal gun, I grab some measurements while under minimal load (just sitting on my desk):
Keyboard: Linux: 35.4C, Haiku 40C
Above keyboard: Linux: 30, Haiku: 42.1
Palm rest: Linux: 32.4, Haiku: 38.4
Underside vent: Linux: 38, Haiku: 54
I feel like my palms shouldn’t be sweaty when using Haiku
Rebooting into Linux has the fan turn on full speed before prompting for the disk encryption password.
It seems System76 laptops have all sort of power management problems with Haiku, but Haiku works really well on other laptops, so it might be that S76 made a mistake somewhere in their firmware. I would still recommend to contact them.
Perhaps a good way to eliminate the possibility of S76’s firmware causing the issues with Haiku is for someone to try it on models from other brands (e.g. Tuxedo Computers, Entroware, Slimbook, etc.) using the same Clevo/TongFeng chassis.
I’ll ask S76 about it. The firmware is up to date, except the next version brings Core Boot, which I’m hesitant to try. It would even be good enough to figure out how to manually trigger the fans (I’ll look in to that as well).
Most firmware uses implements checks for the running OS in the Description Tables and enables some hw/power features only when a specific OS/version running.
It is easily possible that S76 provides non-standard/faulty or extremely OS biased tables.
I would check this, and if it is the case here i would contact the company and ask for fix/refund, but thats me.
If you use UEFI boot, you could try to boot Haiku with Clover (it currently cant boot legacy Haiku installs, patches welcome) and use its description table replace/patching functionality and roll your own RSDT, SSDT, FADT, XSDT, DSDT.
For a quick test you could extract and decompile those tables and try to recompile the resulted artifacts. The count of errors emitted by isl should give you a general feeling about the quality of the firmware.
For me it makes sense that Haiku is not as good as Linux in terms of power management. We did not put a lot of effort into this, while Linux surely did (mainly because of Android, but it also benefits Desktop Linux).
We are unable to put peripherals to sleep. We have various applications waking up the CPU quite often when there is no need to. If you use nightly images, we have a lot of debugging code that means the CPU is a lot more busy than it could otherwise.
I would start to investigate there before suspecting something evil from the computer manufacturer. Especially from System76 who is well known for doing as much as they can to provide good Linux support and work on open sourcing parts of their hardware. You would expect them to do a better job here than other manufacturers who test only with Windows, at least.
