System fan control

dbezona · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 68

So I am hoping someone can help me with this, as it seems to be a somewhat obscure problem (many searches have turned up little).

I have a Sony Vaio desktop (not laptop) system - P4 1.7GHz

The issue is that without manual intervention, the system fans run at full blast under Linux - apparently the BIOS in most systems control this, but apparently not mine. (This didn't happen under Windows)

My solution, up until now, is using lm_sensors and a shell script to turn the fans down at boot time, and then GKrellm to monitor the temps, and run a couple of other scripts to turn up the fans if the temperatures exceed a certain point.

It works fairly well, really, but I am just wondering if there is something missing here - I have been able to find so little reference to the issue in any of the searches I have done over the last few months, I just find it a bit odd.

Anyway, if anyone has any ideas on better ways to handle this, I would be grateful.

AlterEgo · Veteran Joined: 25 Apr 2002 Posts: 1619

Your solution is quite nice: good thinking

but it is risky: what happens if gkrellm were to crash?
(be glad it's not an Atlon processor you've got: it would die very quickly).

I don't think there's something like speedfan for linux:
maybe you can talk the owner into giving access to the source code:
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

dbezona · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 68

Malakin · Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2003 4:17 am Post subject:

EvilTwinSkippy · Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2003 10:52 pm Post subject: Neat Solution

I know it's been said before, but that's a damn cool solution to the problem. (Pardon the pun.)

I would like to point out that a lot of desktops these days are actually using laptop parts. (Hell some dell laptops are starting to use desktop parts, but I digress.)

About the only thing that I would suggest is dropping a watchdog script in your crontab. The watchdog script simply ps's to see if your monitor is working, and if it isn't rekick it. I use that for a tcl script that maintains my cluster of data center servers. The script syncronizes the passwords, downloads patches, and keeps the clocks in tune. Until I discovered ssh, I would have this script execute every hour.

Now, I was actually doing the opposite to what your script needs to do. Instead of restarting
a stopped program, my script was killing a stuck one. Later on I adapted it to restart dead services.
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hotcamus · Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2003 4:51 pm Post subject:

In my case, a Compaq Presario laptop, the problem of having the fans running at full speed was an ACPI issue.

Now, with the 2.4.20 vanilla-kernel and its corresponding ACPI patch, the fans work well, as in windows.

dbezona · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 68

AlterEgo · Veteran Joined: 25 Apr 2002 Posts: 1619

dbezona,
would you mind posting your fanspeed-control-script?
* curious *

dbezona · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 68

Hehe - sure. Actually, calling it a "script" is generous.

Basically, lm_sensors provides an interface to the various sensors chips within /proc - some of them are manually configurable, two of them (at least for my chip set) provide a method to control the fan speed, simply by changing the value like you would any plain text file.

So, here is my boot-time "script", which turns the fans to a very low speed:

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

You could have the script run a job after 5 minutes (or something) that turns them down. If the warning comes again, they'd turn up again. Something like that anyway.
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dbezona · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 68