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fan control on amilo series with linux

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fan control on amilo series with linux

Postby iaclizardking » Fri Nov 02, 2007 10:41 pm

Hello,
I have got a amilo m 1425. I have some strange problem wih Acpi and fan control under Linux Ubuntu 7.10.
The cpu freq. scaling is working but the fan speedstep does not work. I have a horrible noise by the cooler.
I have found a lots of web site that reports that like this http://www.ailis.de/~k/archives/6-Linux ... M1425.html
Also in this site it reports some strange problem with acpi.
I noticed then following (quoting that site):

Quote:
Another interesting note: Gabor Keresztfalvi has disassembled the DSDT of the Amilo and found out that the thermal zones are hardcoded. That means its absolutely ok that linux says the CPU is 75°C hot. This temperature is hard coded to tell the operating system that everything is fine. If a critical event occurs then the temperature will be raised to a value greater then the hardcoded alarm temperature (85°C) to tell the operating system that something is fishy.


Is strange that acpi have got always the CPU tmp like 75°C and the fan is not presente by proc in /proc/acpi/fan like report some website in /proc/acpi/fan/FAN like this http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2122

They could set the fan speed editing that value that I haven't.

Someone could help me? I heard about editing the DSTD file of ACPI and compile it and put in the kernel to make some progress. But I'm unable to following this guide.

http://laptopsurf.blogspot.com/2006/...ved-amilo.html

Some one could help me to write my DSTD?

Here is the bug in launchpad:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ ... +bug/57617

Regards,
iaclizardking
 
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no acpi fan control on some amilo models

Postby lamilo » Thu Feb 14, 2008 4:48 pm

hi,

it's been a whiloe since your post so you might have found the solution, or realized you couldn't solve your problem.

I'm still trying to figure out a way to control either manually or automatically the speed of the cpu fan on an Amilo A7640W with a Sempron 3000+

The first issue is that the k8temp module (which monitor the temp of the c) is buggy...

Then I went through my DSDT only to realize there was no fan support in the ACPI. Moreover, my /proc/acpi/fan folder is empty, so there is no way to control the fan from thee ACPI. Thus you should give up the idea of doing this and find another solution (eg via lm-sensors or else...)

I write back when I got a solution
lamilo
 
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Re: no acpi fan control on some amilo models

Postby iaclizardking » Fri Feb 15, 2008 3:54 am

lamilo wrote:hi,

it's been a whiloe since your post so you might have found the solution, or realized you couldn't solve your problem.


I'm subscribed at the forum. So for each post I got a new mail... SO i'm still active on resolving this..
lamilo wrote:I'm still trying to figure out a way to control either manually or automatically the speed of the cpu fan on an Amilo A7640W with a Sempron 3000+


I have a Intel Pentium M centrino instead


lamilo wrote:Then I went through my DSDT only to realize there was no fan support in the ACPI. Moreover, my /proc/acpi/fan folder is empty, so there is no way to control the fan from thee ACPI. Thus you should give up the idea of doing this and find another solution (eg via lm-sensors or else...)



Mhh yes the DSDT does not even ANY FAN Control, but under Windows I found the way to control it via a particulare DSDT writte in C# for a Hardware Monitor program (I do not remember the name but If you want i Can tell you).
So I know that there is a possibility....But I do even any linux knowledge how to do it..
iaclizardking
 
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Re: no acpi fan control on some amilo models

Postby iaclizardking » Fri Feb 15, 2008 3:58 am

Here is the site here I tool the Windows program and the opensource C# ACPI for contro the fan.. maybe you can implement that on linux.

The program is called NHC Notebook Hardware Control

http://www.pbus-167.com/nhc/nhc_advance ... rogramming (Main Link)

List of alla ACPI supported (temporanly down)

http://nhc.justred.info/
iaclizardking
 
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Postby lamilo » Fri Feb 15, 2008 5:58 am

hi,
thanks for that i'll give it a try, maybe I can use the infos to setup a new acpi section.

on my laptop I now need to figure out how the fan is controlled since I can hear it scream when the GPU is stressed, so t might be linked with onboard graphics... (otherwise it always spins fast and loud, not screaming :P )

the stupid thing is that i can turn the fan off with an externl button, but who wants this ? I am now using conky to monitor my temps and push the button when needed, whateve
er...
lamilo
 
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Postby iaclizardking » Fri Feb 15, 2008 10:13 am

lamilo wrote: I am now using conky to monitor my temps and push the button when needed, whateve
er...


I have a external button to set the CPU Freq at 600 Mhz and so the fan goes more slowly, but conky work in your case to read the temp? Becasuse my /proc report always 75°C
iaclizardking
 
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Postby jcarlos » Sun May 18, 2008 9:28 pm

Hi, guys. Just found this thread while looking for something else, and since I have the same computer i thought about write you a couple of lines.

Right, so a while back I read too the info the OP points to. And a couple of years ago I used to have the fan almost always active. This isn't the case anymore, and many things contribute to this. Possibly you don't have a problem anymore, but perhaps you find something of the following interesting. Right. Our laptop is not one of those modern machines with a good cooling design. The heat sink is pretty small, and the fan not very powerful. On top of that (at least in my case), the dedicated ATI card, while reasonably good, dissipates a lot of heat. I have no idea about how to control de fan speeds; I read something about it, but I'm not really interested. The approach that worked here was to optimise the power savings of the machine as a whole.

I'll list what I think had the highest influence in the behavior of my laptop in this respect, from highest to lowest:

1. Build a kernel with HPET enabled.
2. Find and take rid of bad software for power saving.
3. Lower the GPU clock when not using it for intensive 3D.

1. You probably know that our board (ICH4/ICH4-M) supports HPET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Preci ... ent_Timer/ , but is not activated by default (actually, the developers just found out that it had that feature). To activate it without compiling and using a patch you need a recent kernel (something like 2.6.23 I think) and the boot parameter 'hpet=force'. If Powertop doesn't suggest anything regarding this it means that it's activated.

2. After that I checked what was causing the proccessor to work. Everything you can find in www.lesswatts.org can possibly apply. To summarize: make sure your CPU reaches the C3 sleep state. To do this you can't have any low speed USB device attached to the computer, so no mouse, no external HD and no anything for normal use or it'll heat up quite quick. Have an eye on those applications that constantly wake up the CPU. From my experience, you get a quiet environment if you achieve less than 30 wakeups/s (and of course most of the time in C3) when idle.

3. My gx card is an ATI mobility 9700, I don't know about yours. As I said, it really gets hot when gaming; and even idling, it contributes a good deal to the temperature on the right side of the laptop, exactly where the CPU is. Two different solutions for the two different drivers you may be using (given that you have the same graphics card):

a) OSS driver. Apart from the 'dynamic clocks' option in xorg.conf, I use the rovclock utility to lower the GPU memory and core speed when I use the computer for normal tasks (note that I don't use compiz nor anything like that, so for me 'normal tasks' don't require any 3D out of the gx card). I found that setting the core and the memory to 65 doesn't give me any screen corruption and keeps the unit reasonably cool.

b) Fglrx ATI driver. Make sure you use aticonfig --set-powerstate=1 when not requiring heavy use of the graphics unit. This doesn't just lower the clock of its components, but as well it's voltage, being possibly more effective than rovclock (since the documentation for these cards has been released to the public I hope to see this functionality in the free sometime soon).

That's it. Sorry if you already knew all this, but I felt like writing it for it would save me a lot of time had I found something like this a year or so ago. I can assure that my laptop really is quiet now.

PS. If you feel like expending a bit more of time, you can as well undervolt the CPU. This has no negative consequences as far as I and others can tell. Its effects are very, very impressive too. Learn about it in the following links, and if you want me to tell you my settings just ask me: http://phc.athousandnights.de/

Hope this helps.

J.

PS1. As for the '75 C' temperature reading, I'm almost sure it's hard coded, so it's either '75'='fine' or 'something else'='bad'. That's why I don't think that fiddling with the fan set points is of any use. Let the kernel/BIOS/whatever do its job.

PS2. The 'quiet' button just forces the CPU to 600 MHz, and hence you usually get lower fan speeds. But it's quite useless for you don't really want to have your laptop running at a fraction of its capabilities. What is needed is a good frequency scaling and optimised power behavior, not a limited proccessor.
jcarlos
 
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