Ventilation on Linux
 

Hello,

I've installed Linux (Arch) on my laptop which is a Dell Inspirion 5160 and i have a slight problem (or maybe it's not) with the cooling system.
On windows, the fan is working at full power during boot and then shuts down when i'm on the desktop. It restarts when i launch greedy applications or games. But at rest, the fan is shut down, quiet.
On Linux, the fan is working fully all the time, even when i do nothing.

My question is : does it comes from a bad kernel configuration about power management (something like that) or does it comes from the fact that my desktop environment is really greedy and requires the computer to work hard even at rest?
I'm using Gnome. Kernel : 2.6.12

Thanks

Most likely, a bad kernel configuration. If you don't have the proper ACPI support, the fan will run at 100% all the time to protect your CPU.

OKay thanks
Do you have an idea of what to activate in the kernel? I've added some features but nothing changes
(I've enabled some APM features and CPU frequency scaling)

Do you have ACPI enabled? Is kacpid running?

Yes ACPI (and lots of sub-features) are enabled and kacpid is running.

Hrrm, that's rather odd. Have you installed the lm_sensors package to look at CPU temps?

No.. should i?

You should. This would tell us if your CPU really is hot, or if your fan is just not switching off.

I can't launch "sensors"
First i had to "modprobe i2c-sensors"
So i enabled some features as modules in i2c section

Then "sensors" says "no sensor found !"
So maybe i have to modprobe the proper module corresponding to my "sensor".
Actually, i've selected ALL modules in i2c section
The program "sensors-detect" seems to try each sensor module until it finds the one corresponding to my computer. But it can't find sensors....

Actually, the heat sensors seem to work because, at the beginning, the morning, the fan is stopped.
Then, the fan is running at mid-power (and not at full power as i said)
Then, when i go to heavy webpages with many flash banners, it goes at full power but decreases its rate to mid-power again when i leave them.

But this sound is still quite annoying

Ok, i've disabled "speedstep" feature in bios in order to "underclock" the cpu
Now the fan is running at low rate and the noise is not embarrassing

Sorry, it seems that is was not a real problem, thanks anyway