configuration

Several weeks ago during a compilation process, I noticed that my laptop became very hot under my palms. At first, I did not pay any attention to this, however, when it became uncomfortable to work I started to worry. My first thought was that the laptop got dusted and cannot remove the heat effectively. But then I noticed that I did not hear the fan noise when the load on the CPU increases, and I decided that my cooler is either broken or blocked. I was almost about to start disassembling my laptop, but luckily I decided to check the temperature using Linux utilities. There I found out that, despite I feel the laptop being hot, the sensor [thinkpad-isa-0000 -> temp1] showed that the CPU temperature was normal (showing all the time the temperature of 45°C). This looked suspicious, and I checked other sensors measurements and found out that the [coretemp-isa-0000] sensors showed more correct temperature values, which in addition reacted on load increase. In this article, I want to describe, how I forced my system to react also on the values from these additional sensors and cooled down my laptop.

From time to time, I experiment with different tools. In order to have the same environment and to keep my working machine clean from the garbage left after such experiments, I do my investigations in a virtualized environment. Usually, my guest operating system (OS) is Ubuntu Server because I usually use this OS in the cloud. Thus, to completely resemble my experience in the cloud I should have terminal access to the guest operating system. Unfortunately, by default after you have installed a guest virtual machine (VM) you do not have network access to it. Therefore, in this article I will show how to configure VirtualBox and guest OSes so that you get access to your virtual machines from the host, e.g., through terminal.