Fan control

Message

yabo · Post by **yabo** » Sat Nov 11, 2006 10:11 pm

Hello !

I've got an AMD64 laptop (Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo A1630) running a gentoo 64 bits. I've got the Cool'n'Quiet feature running quite well (the cpu speed scales regqrding the load of the system). Though this laptop has a somehow annoying problem which is, it is very very hot, even when the cpu is at its minimum speed (800 Mhz). My question is, is it possible to ask the cpu to stay at le the lowest frequency possible (800 Mhz, which is enough for my use) while asking the fan to be at the max speed (heat is more annoying than noise) ?

I juste looked around for an acpi tool or a bios feature but found nothing :-/

Thanks !

VValdo · Post by **VValdo** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 3:14 am

Did you play around with the values at /etc/fancontrol?

There's a script somewhere that helps you set this up, but I cant' remember where it is exactly...

try the wiki page for fancontrol and you should find it.

FWIW, here's my /etc/fancontrol:

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$ more /etc/fancontrol
INTERVAL=5
FCTEMPS=9191-0290/pwm1=9191-0290/temp1_input
FCFANS=9191-0290/pwm1=9191-0290/fan1_input
MINTEMP=9191-0290/pwm1=40
MAXTEMP=9191-0290/pwm1=50
MINSTART=9191-0290/pwm1=150
MINSTOP=9191-0290/pwm1=100

VValdo · Post by **VValdo** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 3:17 am

Oh, and if you want the CPU to stay at a lower speed, you want to mess with the cpufreq governor. Do a search in the wiki for "cpufreq governor", which you can set to different things-- I use "ondemand" so that frequency scaling goes up only when it's necessary (saving power/heat)

W

hvengel · Post by **hvengel** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 8:55 am

By the way fancontrol is part of lm-sensors.

Janne Pikkarainen · Post by **Janne Pikkarainen** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 9:16 am

In my experience Amilo laptops are just like that, no matter what OS you run them with. My parents has a brand new Amilo laptop, still running Windows XP because I haven't yet got enough time to install Linux there

. Anyway, the laptop is running very hot & noisy, even though in theory it's using Cool 'n Quiet and all that stuff, and my parents use the laptop just for basic web browsing, emailing & photo viewing.

And my another friend has an older Amilo, running with Gentoo & Fluxbox. It also has a tendency to run very hot & noisy... or actually it works silently for 15 minutes, then the fans come up for 15 minutes at full speed, and then it becames silent again. We have not figured out how to make the fans run all the time with some lower speed.

So if fine-tuning the fans in Amilo laptops is possible, I DEFINITELY want to hear about it! And if you can make those things run cool instead of super hot.

ketjow · Post by **ketjow** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 2:54 am

Janne Pikkarainen wrote:And my another friend has an older Amilo, running with Gentoo & Fluxbox. It also has a tendency to run very hot & noisy... or actually it works silently for 15 minutes, then the fans come up for 15 minutes at full speed, and then it becames silent again. We have not figured out how to make the fans run all the time with some lower speed.

So if fine-tuning the fans in Amilo laptops is possible, I DEFINITELY want to hear about it! And if you can make those things run cool instead of super hot.

You can specify a constant speed the fan should run at by writing to a file like /sys/devices/platform/i2c-9191/9191-0290/pwm1. I think the parts in bold can differ.
Anyway, the higher value you write, the faster is the fan. I have a value range from 1 to 150.
Hope this helps

yabo · Post by **yabo** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 5:03 pm

Thanks you for all the replies !

I've trier the different methods that were said here with no success. I'm wondering if the problem isn't here :

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# sensors
Can't access procfs/sysfs file
Unable to find i2c bus information;
For 2.6 kernels, make sure you have mounted sysfs and libsensors
was compiled with sysfs support!
For older kernels, make sure you have done 'modprobe i2c-proc'!
#

Though sysfs is mounted :

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# mount
/dev/hda1 on / type reiserfs (rw,noatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec)
...

I'm running 2.6.17 (gentoo-sources) with i2c support.

Thanks !

VValdo · Post by **VValdo** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 8:50 am

did you run /usr/sbin/sensors-detect ?

W

Pat-rizio · Post by **Pat-rizio** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 2:19 pm

I think the script to configure fancontrol VValdo says is

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pwmconfig