In my last post on the subject of the MacBook Pro noise dilemma, I dismissed with borderline contempt the notion that “opening and closing Mirror.widget” was a reasonable workaround for the CPU whine problem. I felt pretty certain after my experiments with tweaking CPU usage that any workaround would necessarily equate to equivalent CPU usage or battery draw behind the scenes.

I may yet turn out to have been right, but I’m now using the “Mirror Widget Hack” (MWH) instead of my own QuietMBP. Why? I just got the feeling that my machine was running hotter, mooing more, and generally behaving less amicably when QuietMBP was used to alleviate the symptoms instead of the magical Mirror.widget. The damned computer feels like a wise investment when I use the MWH! I love it again (mostly). So, to all the readers who felt dismissed by my jarring rejection of MWH: mea culpa. I’m sorry.

I don’t like magic, though. At least not when I can’t understand it. I’m ready to admit that MWH does something that brings my computer into a state of calm, but if MWH can do it, surely some other piece of software, that is more convenient to run than a dashboard widget, can do the same thing. I decided to start looking carefully into what exactly happens to the computer when you apply this hack.

First of all, Mirror.widget contains no code. Well, that’s no fun! How the hell does it fix my system, then? The widget is largely implemented in the form of a special QuickTime movie “mirror2.mov” that is somehow configured to automatically reflect the incoming iSight image in real-time. Great, so I can get the same system-calming affects by opening the movie in QuickTime Player, right? Right. But as soon as I quit QuickTime Player, the noise comes back. When you close the widget, the noise stays away forever (actually until you use some app other than Dashboard that opens and then closes access to the iSight). I thought I’d try to open the widget in Safari. No dice. Even after editing the widget so it would attempt to operate despite not being in the Dashboard – it silences the noise while the movie is visible, but the noise comes back after closing the web page. Get this: even turning off the movie in Mirror Widget, by clicking the little “i” in the lower left corner causes the noise to come back. Something about the (perhaps clumsy, but beautifully, wondrously clumsy) way that Dashboard closes up shop for the widget while the movie is active causes the system to get “stuck in good mode.”

I decided to whip out Shark, Apple’s profiling tool from the CHUD toolset. I figured there must be something different about “my computer doing nothing” before and after the magic MWH. To get a fairly straightforward sample, I quiet all visible applications except Shark and the Finder. Then, with the noise blaring, I took a 2 second timed sample of “Everything.” This means all processes on the system that are using any CPU time at all for anything. Then I silenced the MBP with the MWH, and grabbed an identical 2 second sample. I did this a few times to make sure there were no statistical anomalies coloring my view of what’s going on. The difference between the two samples? Almost absofrickinlutely nothing. In fact, nothing of interest I can pinpoint after multiple sessions of sampling at different rates, over different durations, and using different sampling configuration.

The Mirror Widget is magic. I use it and love it. Be warned that as soon as you use your iSight again in another app, and then quit, the noise will come back. But other than that, I now switch my allegiance to Mirror Widget. I just wish I knew why it does what it does. Maybe somebody with more Shark skills than I can get to the bottom of this.

Update: Supporting evidence that the silence is a side-effect of a poor “cleanup” from Dashboard: opening mirror2.mov in QuickTime Player and then force-quitting QuickTime player produces the same “permanent” fix to the system. Also, opening Photo Booth (or I presume any other iSight-using app) and force-quitting it while the silence is golden will achieve the same result. Getting closer to an answer!

More: Apple’s “WhackedTV” developer sample also eliminates the noise if you add a video track in the app (defaults to iSight) and then quit. Apparently however it cleans up or doesn’t clean up upon quit is also well-suited to leaving the Mac in quiet mode.

Update 2: I decided to hack the WhackedTV example to produce the simplest possible app that can shut the MBP up and immediately quit. This would make a suitable login item, and can be manually relaunched any time the noise comes back (e.g. after using the iSight for something real). Download MagicNoiseKiller (Intel only) today!

Since I first wrote about the MacBook Pro CPU noise problem, some things have come into sharper focus. Unfortunately, there is still no official fix (or even acknowledgment of a problem) from Apple for the CPU noise, but there are some interesting tidbits I’ve noticed on the Apple discussion forums and elsewhere:

• The “brightness-related” noise is a distinct and acknowledged defect. Apparently Apple has identified the humming/hissing noise many MBP owners experience as caused by a faulty “display inverter.” The noise is usually only present when the display is at less than full brightness, and goes away immediately at full brightness. It sounds like owners who are afflicted by this noise can get their laptop serviced under warranty. I will certainly do this as it’s distracting and a waste of battery to run at full brightness, but I’m waiting to see if any of the other issues might be fixable in the same service request.
• People believe in magic. There is widespread discussion about the fact that running a 3rd party “Mirror” widget alleviates the noise indefinitely, even after the widget is shut. People are so excited by this fix that they are going out of their way to come up with automated techniques for invoking and then quitting that widget. I can’t help but think that if the noise is stopped, something interesting is still going on. I assume that running the Widget configures the hardware in such a way that power is being consumed even after the widget is closed. I took a look at the Widget and observed that at its core is a standalone QuickTime movie that contains all the iSight integration. You can open the movie independently of the Dashboard (with QuickTime Player) and cause the noise to stop. However, when you close the movie from QT Player the noise resumes. I don’t believe there is a magic solution to this problem, since it seems so directly related to power consumption.
• There is a 3rd noise. A somewhat distracting noise, sort of like a lowing cow, occasionally emerges from the lower-rigth quadrant of my MBP. I haven’t heard this noise discussed much, but in my opinion it might as well be tossed into the defect list. It sounds like a false-starting motor, or something. I don’t know if it’s a fan that starts up and then decides it doesn’t need to, or if it’s the DVD drive trying to access a non-existant DVD. I would like this issue to enter the discussion, though.
• Some people, including Scott Stevenson, have noticed that plugging an external USB device into the MBP alleviates the noise. This isn’t convenient for me, but if you’ve got a USB flash drive around that happens to silence it – might not be such a bad way to buy your sanity.
• People are excited about Cryptonome. Since I shut down comments on the last MBP noise post, people have been emailing me furiously, concerned that they might miss out on the culmination of Cryptonome’s work. I’m excited to see what he comes up with, but I have also been warned that such manipulation of the MBP’s power management strategy might be dangerous. I’m sure the delay in Cryptonome’s releasing anything is because he’s carefully studying the impact such a tool would have, but I would be timid about running such a tool all the same.
• QuietMBP is still the best all-purpose workaround I know of for the CPU noise. I’ve updated the application to include a slider so users can precisely control the amount of CPU the program uses. This should satisfy the curiosity of those who worry I could be using less CPU to achieve the same goal, and it’s also fun to play with the slider to hear the difference in sound at various CPU utilization. Download QuietMBP 1.1.

I still anxiously await a public response to the CPU whine issue from Apple. It’s the single biggest downer about the MBP and it’s affecting a whole heck of a lot of people. I’m still getting hundreds of referrals a day from Apple discussion forums, and the popularity of that single entry’s URL is about to exceed the default entry URL for my blog as a whole.

Update: People are starting to record their MacBook Pro noises, and to be honest they are usually not representative of what it really feels like to be in a quiet room with the problem worming itself into your brain. But this post by Paul Turner includes an interesting analysis of the sound showing up in Logic (Apple’s own pro audio recording software) with no microphone plugged in. He observed that the subtle but insanity-inducing “CPU whine/twitter” actually shows up in a Logic recording even when it’s not audible through the speakers. Interesting, indeed. I feel really bad for Apple. I love Apple and I don’t want to see this machine turn into a complete audio lemon. I also don’t want to regret my purchase, since I’m interested in home recording myself. This is just one more downer for what is otherwise a great machine.

A much-overlooked perk of Mac OS X’s BSD underpinnings is the presence of full-fledged support for NFS (network file system) in every shipping version of the operating system. This support serves as the underlying technology for the “Network Domain,” the fourth member of a family of directory hierarchies that also includes the System, Local, and User domains. Within each of these domains, a predictable directory layout allows for the storage of applications, preferences, fonts, etc., in such a way that a properly-written application can transparently make such resources available to the user as a unified whole.

Most users are probably not familiar with the concept of file-system domains at all. Among those who are, it probably boils down to a vague understanding that stuff in /Library is shared, stuff in the home directory is private, and stuff in /System should not be modified. The mysterious /Network directory is occasionally used to sluggishly locate shared directories from other computers on the LAN (local area network), but is rarely configured to fulfill its complete potential as the Network domain.

A FastScripts user recently contacted me. He works in a newspaper office, and is curious about whether there is any facility in FastScripts for sharing a directory of scripts to his entire team. Frustratingly, I have to tell users like this one that there is support for just such a setup – the network domain – but that setting it up is about the most convoluted Mac OS X task imaginable. It’s so beyond the scope of what any average user should be asked to do, that I’m tempted to implement a custom inter-computer sharing system, just so I can offer my customers a “do it for me” switch. Apple’s advice? “Implementation of the network domain is the responsibility of the network administrator.”

But the network domain is an awesome idea! So it looks like you get to be the network administrator. By setting it up correctly you gain a centralized share for all users of a LAN that benefits not only FastScripts, but any other application that correctly iterates the four domains for supporting files! For this reason, it’s worth knowing how to set up, and worth pressuring Apple to make the setup easier for everyday users. The remainder of this article details the steps you may take to both publish a shared “Library” folder from one computer and subscribe to it from any number of other computers on your LAN.

Configuration: A High Level Overview

Before you tackle the task of setting up your network domain Library folder, you should be familiar with some terms used by the technologies on the Mac.

NetInfo is a unique Mac OS X technology inherited from NeXT. NetInfo is a database that manages many of the attributes of a computer and network that would, on more conventional UNIX systems, be managed entirely with text-based configuration files. Among NetInfo’s many responsibilities is the management NFS automount server and client information for particular machines on a network.

NFS is a UNIX technology for exposing shared directories from one system and mounting them to another. Unlike Apple’s legacy AppleShare system, where mounted servers appear functionally identical to mounted disks, NFS volumes can be attached virtually anywhere in the filesystem you desire (this is true for regular disks as well, but is rarely exploited). For instance, if you want to publish your music collection from one computer and have it show up on all other computers at the path “/MyStuff/ObscurePath/Whatever/Music/”, NetInfo can make that happen. The arbitrary location at which you decide to attach the shared directory is called a “mount point.”

A cool feature of NFS is a sort-of lazy loading technique whereby a mount point can remain unconnected until it is actually needed by some application. The technology responsible for this magic is called “automount.” What’s really cool about automounting an NFS shared volume is that it gracefully handles the absence of either the server or the client. So when you wander outside the realm of your LAN, the funky Music mount point described above simply fails to locate the network resource. Instead of starting a 4-alarm fire, you simply get an “empty” directory.

So bringing this all together, how do we employ the underlying technologies such that we achieve our primary goal? We want a shared network domain Library folder, and the way to do that is by publishing an NFS volume that gets subscribed to with an automount mount point at “/Network/Library”.

On the Server: Publish an NFS Volume

First things first, we need to pick a directory on our “server” box and publish that to the LAN via NFS. In NFS terminology this is called an “export,” and the way this is configured on Mac OS X is via a top-level NetInfo directory entry called “exports.” NetInfo can get really complicated and to make things simple I’m just going to show you how you can add a plain-vanilla NFS export for a folder located at “/Library/MyNetworkShares/Library”. The “nicl” command-line utility makes this relatively straightforward:

sudo nicl . -create /exports/\\/Library\\/MyNetworkShares\\/Library opts alldirs maproot=nobody

Note the crazy backslash overload. That’s because we want to get slashes into the actual name of the directory entry in NetInfo. The same task could be accomplished from the NetInfo Manager application, where you can also confirm visually that the configuration has been made as expected:

Once the NetInfo database has been updated, you can either attempt to ensure that all of the required daemons are reset and recognize the new exports settings, or you can just reboot, which should get the NFS startup item to reload and configure everything corectly. By default the NFS server is enabled, and starts at boot time if there are any exports defined.

To confirm the NFS export is set up and your daemon is operational, simply run the showmount command from the command line on the server:

showmount -e 
Exports list on localhost:
/Library/MyNetworShares/Library           Everyone

Now from another machine (or the same – doesn’t really matter), confirm the ability to actual mount the “volume”. My server machine is identifiable on the local network as “danielG5.local”, so I mount the exported directory on my laptop with:

mkdir /tmp/testmount
mount_nfs danielG5.local:/Library/MyNetworkShares/Library /tmp/testmount

Et voila! /tmp/testmount now looks and acts exactly as the /Library/MyNetworkShares/Library folder on the server.

On the Client: Configure the Network Mount Point

Now that we’ve confirmed the ability to mount the server on a whim, we need to arrange for the client machine to automatically “wire up” to the server whenever the /Network/Library directory is accessed. We do that by configuring a similar NetInfo node to the “exports” item above.

This time, the node resides in “mounts” and serves to inform the automounter about where the network resource is and where it should appear on the local machine. Run the following commands in the terminal, substituting the appropriate computer name for “danielG5.local”:

sudo nicl . -create /mounts/danielG5.local:\\/Library\\/MyNetworkShares\\/Library
sudo nicl . -append /mounts/danielG5.local:\\/Library\\/MyNetworkShares\\/Library type nfs
sudo nicl . -append /mounts/danielG5.local:\\/Library\\/MyNetworkShares\\/Library dir /Network/Library
sudo nicl . -append /mounts/danielG5.local:\\/Library\\/MyNetworkShares\\/Library opts ""

And another visual confirmation from NetInfo Manager puts me at ease:

Again, rebooting is probably the safest way to ensure that the changes are picked up by the automount daemon, but since automount is normally running by default, you should be able to simply restart the daemon:

sudo kill -1 `cat /var/run/automount.pid`

Go ahead and try it out – navigate in the Finder to /Network/Library. You should see the contents of “/Library/MyNetworkShares/Library” from the server computer. I have found the Finder’s concept of /Network to sometimes be a little flakey, so if it doesn’t seem to be working, try changing to the directory from the Terminal instead. I think this kind of thing irons itself out after a reboot. Once you’ve got it wired up, you can start putting junk in the folder that you want to have at your disposal on all machines on the LAN. Fonts, Scripts, etc. If an application doesn’t behave as you expect it to with the Network domain, let the application’s author know (in fact, FastScripts could benefit from a few tweaks to improve its functionality, though it basically works). This is a powerful and very cool infrastructure that more of us should be taking advantage of.

Simplifying the Process

If repeating this process on all the clients in your LAN sounds daunting, fear not. A real network administrator would probably have some kind of sophisticated NetInfo hierarchy through which she could easily manipulate the “mounts” values for all of the machines in the network, but I’m going to assume you’re like me and are just hacking together a solution for a few machines in your house. We can use the “nidump” and “niload” commands to essentially copy and paste the successful settings from one client to another. First, obtain a raw text format copy of the mounts data:

nidump -r /mounts . > MyEasyMounts.txt

Now take that text file to whatever client you like, and load it into that client’s NetInfo database:

sudo niload -m -r /mounts . < MyEasyMounts.txt

Don’t forget to either reboot or confidently reset the automount daemon again.

The process described above can be repeated for other top-level Network domain folders like “Applications.” Just make a different folder on the server and add appropriate exports and mounts entries to the server and clients. Have fun, and enjoy your Network domain!

I’m the (mostly) happy owner of a MacBook Pro (MBP). Like every other MBP owner, I’m excited and happy to have at my portable fingertips unprecedented Mac computing power. Also like every other owner, I’m slowly going insane from the now infamous “hissing/whining” processor noise.

As annoying as this noise is, it’s nothing new to me. I suffered a nearly identical noise on my Dual PowerMac G5, until I discovered through the folk wisdom of the Internet that “disabling CPU napping” would alleviate the problem. Ah – sweet silence! Since that day, I have been flagrantly wasting CPU energy on my Mac by way of the “disable napping” script that runs every time the computer boots. The script relies on extra software provided by Apple’s CHUD tools, and on the rare occasion when my computer has ended up temporarily without those tools, I’ve noticed almost immediately that my brain was once again being bored into by little audio termites.

The problem on the MacBook Pro is generating a lot of discussion on the web. I think it’s worse now because the laptop sits closer to and relatively level to your ears, while the G5 tower often rests somewhere around the corner of your desk and closer to the floor. Annoying whine from an Apple product? No problem, I’ll just pull the ol’ “disable napping” trick. Ha ha! I’m so good at this. What? The Pentium M doesn’t support napping? Sure enough, typing the magical “hwprefs cpu_nap=false” command at the command line returns the very unhelpful “nap not supported by this processor type.”

Over the past few weeks, a number of data points have emerged on the web about what may or may not cause the hissing noise, and what may or may not quell it. Among the most prominent is the observation that “using the built-in iSight” causes the noise to disappear. I tried this the way most people try it, by launching the bundled Photo Booth program. Sure enough. No more noise. But how could that be? I had a hard time believing that there was some magical link between the video circuitry and the “annoying noise” circuitry.

Spotting a link to discussions about the problem in Rentzsch‘s del.icio.us feed, I was reminded to look into the problem more carefully. Personally, though running the Photo Booth application does quiet the noise, it’s not something I feel comfortable doing with my extremely powerful, top-of-the-line Mac notebook!

I sat down at my MBP, intent on getting to the bottom of the problem. I planned to try different things and see what made the noise change or go away. But what’s this? No noise? Try as I might, I couldn’t get irritation to occur. Aha, I noticed at last. I’m plugged in. With the MBP plugged in and charging, apparently the computer doesn’t produce the noise. I was becoming more and more convinced that the problem lay in the CPUs. I disconnected the extremely cool magnetic power connector, and the noises immediately started occurring. If it’s a CPU issue, then perhaps disabling one of the cores will alleviate the problem. Yes, on my machine it certainly did. This is all consistent with the Dual G5 noise problem: when the lazy core has nothing to do, it makes a whining “I’m bored” noise.

It make sense that a video-intensive program like Photo Booth would alleviate the problem. Not because it’s using the built-in iSight, but because it’s furiously processing video data and undoubtedly making the most of that dual-core Pentium chip. Fine – but that means if I’m running Photo Booth I’m taking power away from other programs, like my compiler, that could really make better use of it. Also – the green glow of the iSight camera’s activity LED doesn’t exactly fade into the background. Isn’t there some other program that could keep the CPU just busy enough to stay quiet?

I’m not sure if there is such a program, so I made my own. It turns out that writing an extremely asinine program designed to spin the CPU endlessly does silence the problem. My program simply loops forever comparing the same byte of a string to a character value which it will never be. Pretty stupid, huh? At first I just let it take over the whole CPU, to confirm that the noise would stop, but then I got curious about how much I could yield and still keep the computer quiet. During my experiments, I added a call to usleep() and played with different settings to see at what threshold the noise would come back. In my extremely unscientific tests, the tool has to use around 8% of the (a?) CPU to keep the noise from happening. Arranging for less aggressive use of the CPU resulted in variations on the hissing noise’s rhythm and perceived pitch. I am willing to part with 8% of the CPU if I must, but is there a better way?

I remembered that this is UNIX, and one nice thing about UNIX is the “nice” function call, which sets your priority either lower or higher than the “standard priority.” Apparently nice() has been obsoleted by a newer “setpriority()” call, so if you want your code to be correct you should use that instead. I like using nice() because this is a hack, it works, and I like the way it sounds. Here is my complete “dumbcpu” command-line tool, which should silence your MBP:

main()
{
   char* dummy = "blastedPentiumM";

   // Give this process the lowest possible priority
   (void) nice(20);

   // "Use" that CPU
   while (dummy[0] != 'l')
   {
      // Give the CPU a rest. Use a lower value if it's still noisy.
      usleep(100);
   }
}

For my less programming-minded readers, this is the source code to a complete command line tool that, when compiled, can be run from the Terminal application. If you’re not up for all that, just download the compiled binary, which also includes the source file. [Update: Check out the 1.1 version here, sorry no source for this one]. You should also be able to add the compiled binary to your “Login Items” in order to have the tool run (and your noise silenced) every time you log in to your account. (Update: This wasn’t true at first, but is now that I have changed the binary distribution to a simple application instead of a command-line tool).

How important is it to run this command-line tool instead of Photo Booth? To confirm my suspicions that running Photo Booth was robbing me of valuable processing time, I picked the closest project at hand and timed a clean build of it from the command line with xcodebuild. On my 1GB RAM MBP running full-bore, with annoying whining noises and all it takes almost 8 seconds exactly to complete this build from start to finish. Next I launched Photo Booth and ran the test again. This time it took almost 9 seconds. So Photo Booth is robbing me of 1 out of every 9 seconds. Unacceptable.

Running the above-linked tool quiets my MacBook Pro, yet allows compiles and any other ordinary tasks that want to harness my MBP’s power to complete at full-speed. Observing the behavior of all involved tasks with the “top” command line tool, it’s easy to see how the “dumbcpu” tool drops to nearly 0% CPU use when other, more important tasks are being run.

Does this problem suck? Yes. Does it need to be addressed by Apple before the world goes insane from humming/hissing disease? Yes. Does this little tool work around the problem in a more acceptable way than any other proposal I’ve seen? I humbly suggest that it does.

Update: Smart people like Kevin Ballard and Chris Liscio quickly observed that this tool takes up 100% of the CPU when the machine is idling, which sort of sucks. So to alleviate this, I put back a usleep() call in the while loop. On my MBP usleep(100) seems to cause about an 8% CPU usage, which is still half of what Photo Booth takes, and keeps the CPU quiet. The downloadable binary has also been updated with this change. Thanks Kevin & Chris for pointing this out.

Update 2: I notice a noise still persists when I run the tool, though it’s much less noticeable. I think it’s the “sound of one chip napping” or whatever. I suppose that altering the tool so that it spawned a thread to keep both CPUs busy might seriously silence the MBP. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the concerned reader.