ACPI or lm-sensors fan control on Sony Vaio (fan runs at full speed)
 

A few days ago I bought a Sony Vaio VPCW12(SE1). It's a 10" netbook and currently all hardware is supported, except for the fan control.

After doing hours of research, it looks like Sony doesn't provide any inside technical information about their hardware. So not all models are supported by the kernel, or lm-sensors. This is why the fan directory in /proc/acpi/ is empty. I know there is a kernel module/project called 'Sony Laptop' (sonypi), but it doesn't look like that module helps for the fan either.

When doing 'sensors-detect', it doesn't detect anything. Well, only a National Semiconductors with an unknown chip called '0xfc11' is present. But lm-sensors cannot do anything with it. I even tried to manually modprobe some lm** modules, no luck.

There are some i2c error messages. I did 'dmesg | grep i2c' and the following error appears:

i2c adapter: unable to read EDID block

It really looks my ACPI hardware simply isn't supported (too bad). But before I ask help from lm-sensors/acpi developers, I need to know if there are maybe some others users that solved this problem.

I tried to just open the netbook, and put a resistor between the fan wiring. Sadly enough Sony prevents this by letting me think I will break the case while opening ;)

Can anybody give me some advise?

I'm using:
Ubuntu Linux (tried some other non-deb distro's)
Atom 280
i945

Well, it's not just you. My CS110E returns the same stuff for the sensors, although my hard-drive sensors and CPU temp sensors are working. The fan, though, seems to be a different animal.

openSUSE seems to work for me, and my fan cycles on/off as it should. I have read, though, that different distros sometimes don't work that way. Probably differences in the ACPI stuff, but I can't understand why that would be the case. Perhaps openSUSE might solve your issue as well, if you feel like changing distros.

I got it to load nicely on my other Asus EEE, but be warned: I had to use the network installation version. It booted from USB optical just fine, but wouldn't do a load from the DVD (???). The network installation came up and went without a hitch, although it DID take far longer. :)

Thanks for your reply. I'm pretty sure that changing to opensuse won't give me any success. After all, the other distro's didn't show any differences. So at this point it looks like a kernel support problem (which is also not very strange, because the netbook is quite new).

True, but you might be surprised. I tried ubuntu/kubuntu on my Asus at first, and got a different set of supported/unsupported hardware than I did with openSUSE.

It's at least worth a try, even from the live CD distro, just to see if you get different results.

I can testify to opensuse and new hardware. Novell, who makes suse, adds many custom hardware detection and drivers to suse linux. Other distros don't have these 'add-ons'.

if you built your own kernel skip the make mrproper skip loading the file. just load the config in the /usr/src/uname-r
cd /usr/src/uname-r make mrproper and do a make xconfig load the config file from your /boot/ folder
now find the sony acpi stuff enable it then check to be built and then save the file. do a make modules then a make modules install . If you are using proprietary drivers for your nvida card then reinstall them.
good luck. the 2.6.31.4 kernel has some new sony stuff in it. I know slackware it comes with it ready to go.

I've tried both of your possible solutions. OpenSUSE and compiling the newest kernel. None of these had effect.

Probably I just have to wait some time before my hardware gets supported...

The 11.2 was released this week. I'm surprised it didn't work on your Vaio, though...I've had 4 over the past several years, and all of them have played very nicely with either Mandriva or openSUSE. All the important goodies were supported. My CS110E 'media touch' keys aren't working with 11.1, but I'm going to load 11.2 on it this week. I *THINK* they'll work then, but that's not been a show-stopper for me. The fans, CPU scaling, webcams, etc., have all worked...