I've been considering the upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion, but will probably wait just a little while longer. I have a (Sept 2010) MacBook Pro, it has been an excellent machine - I also have a 21" iMac and a standard MacBook all of which perform.
The issue that I have is that on the MacBook Pro I run Virtual Box and Solaris 11 among others, as does one of the guys that I work with. He has recently come across an interesting feature - which we have not been able to resolve so far.
Once he upgraded to Lion and when running the Solaris Virtual Machine, if he left the Macbook and it went into hibernate the following happened.
1 The MacBook got very hot.
2 If the power cube was plugged in it became too hot to touch.
3 When you eventually got onto the Virtual machine typing was near impossible due to repeating keys.
4 When you could have a look around - the 15 min Load Average on the Solaris Virtual M/C could be well up into the 2000's.
I'm guessing that this is actually a Virtual Box problem, just high lighted by Lion. We are going to go to Mountain Lion on his machine, to see if that resolves the problem.
I have been in touch with Oracle as the latest version of VBox was used as was a downloaded virtual machine from them. I'll keep people posted if there are any changes.
I do like the look of Mountain Lion, really getting towards what Sun's Project Looking Glass was all about - just you don't need an enterprise class server to run it!
I am thinking to purchase a new MacBook Air, 13 inch.
Anyone have a MacBook Air? What do you think about it? Seems expensive, a bit. Is it worth it? (9 Replies)
ASMC(4) BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual ASMC(4)NAME
asmc -- device driver for the Apple System Management Console (SMC)
SYNOPSIS
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following line in your kernel configuration file:
device asmc
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5):
asmc_load="YES"
DESCRIPTION
The asmc driver controls the Apple System Management Console (SMC for short) found on Intel Apple systems.
The SMC is known to be found on the following systems:
o MacBook
o MacBook Pro
o Intel MacMini
o Mac Pro
o MacBook Air
o Intel iMac
With this driver, you can configure your keyboard backlight brightness, check temperatures of several sensors, check the speed of the inter-
nal fans and check the status of the Sudden Motion Sensor.
Variables related to the SMC control and inspection are exported via sysctl(3) under the device tree dev.asmc.
KEYBOARD BACKLIGHT
On MacBook Pro systems, you can control the keyboard brightness by writing a value to the dev.asmc.%d.light.control sysctl MIB.
The following sysctl MIBs contains the raw value returned by the left and right light sensors: dev.asmc.%d.light.left or
dev.asmc.%d.light.right.
TEMPERATURES
The number of temperature sensors and their description varies among systems. You can inspect the temperature sensors on your system by
traversing the dev.asmc.temp sysctl MIB.
All values are in degrees celsius.
SYSTEM FANS
The dev.asmc.fan.%d sysctl tree contains the leaf nodes speed, safespeed, minspeed, maxspeed and targetspeed. Each of these leaf nodes rep-
resent the current fan speed, the safest minimum fan speed, the mininum speed and the maximum speed respectively.
All values are in RPM.
SUDDEN MOTION SENSOR
The Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS for short) is a device that detects laptop movement and notifies the operating system via an interrupt. The
sysctl MIBs present under dev.asmc.sms all relate to the SMS.
The most interesting usage of this device is to park the disk heads when the laptop is moved harshly. First, you need to install ataidle(8)
(ports/sysutils/ataidle) and then configure devd(8) the following way:
notify 0 {
match "system" "ACPI";
match "subsystem" "asmc";
action "/usr/local/sbin/ataidle -s X Y";
};
Do not forget to change the X and Y values in the command above.
Also, please note that parking the disk heads too many times can dramatically reduce your hard drive's life span. Do not rely solely on the
SMS to protect your hard drive: good care and common sense can increase your hard drive's life.
SEE ALSO ataidle(8) (ports/sysutils/ataidle), devd(8), sysctl(8)HISTORY
The asmc driver first appeared in FreeBSD 8.0.
AUTHORS
Rui Paulo <rpaulo@FreeBSD.org> (Google Summer of Code project).
BUGS
Support for the latest models was never tested and is most likely not fully working.
BSD July 27, 2009 BSD
