how to control notebook fan speed?
 

Hi all,

When I use Slackware on my laptop, the CPU fan is from right about 5 minutes of use onward, seemingly maxed out. On other OS's (Windows 7 or LinuxMint) I don't get this behavior.

I've ran
and it asked me to put in /etc/rc.d/rc.local the lines:
modprobe coretemp
/usr/bin/sensors -s

But it's still very noisy.

How can I work this out?

Any strange messages in dmesg?

The laptop model would also be useful to know. Sometimes particular models have strange parts that don't have drivers yet. <EDIT> And in the case of Mint, sometimes Canonical uses patches on the kernel that have not yet made it to the mainline kernel.</EDIT>

If your laptop is thinkpad, you may try this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/thinkfan/

It works really well.

I just tried it on my Thinkpad T60, because fan is always running (http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Proble...ays-on_problem). Version 0.9_beta2 doesn't work at all
but 0.8.1 works and finally my fan stopped spinning. Thanks!

Is there some safe values table for thinkpads? Because I'm not sure if I have to worry about this warning:
By the way, I also tried ThinkPad-Fan-Control and it lets you control the fan speed, although fan never stop spinning in automatic mode. So I'll stick with thinkfan.

On many laptops it is not possible to directly control the fanspeed. To help you we need more information:
- Manufacturer/model of the laptop
- Is the power-management of the CPU working correctly?
- In case of AMD/ATI or Nvidia graphics, are you using the free or the proprietary drivers?
- Have you measured the temperatures (since you already are using the lm_sensors package)?

If this is a Toshiba L305D series, you may as well forget it. I had(ve) one and it constantly overheated from the fan not turning on. I searched everywhere for a way to control the fan, but evidently Toshiba has some really bad BIOS software.

These warnings are harmless, but you should monitor your machine for some time to make sure that the config is safe.

Thinkfan 0.8.x added support for other laptop.
For thinkpad, 0.7.3 is enough.

My config is(thinkfan: 0.7.3; laptop: thinkpad R61i):

(0, 0, 45)
(1, 45, 55)
(7, 55, 32767)

R61i has only 2 levels(1/7)fan speed.

probably you only need a vacuum cleaner and 10 minutes....

Hi all,

I guess that when I posted this thread I was too tired and forgot to mention a few details.

@ottavio, I haven't searched for anything in dmesg, what kind of warning should I have in mind?

As @jprzybylski and @TobiSGD inquired, the laptop is a Dell Inspiron 15R Special Edition (7520).

Following up on @TobiSGD's questions:
It's almost a pristine installation. Today's Monday and I believe I have installed Slackware64-current last Wednesday night. Haven't touched any power-management settings.
The laptop has a hybrid graphics card (AMD Radeon HD 7730M and Intel 4000HD), but I couldn't install proprietary video drivers - it just wouldn't start X after the "aticonfig --initial -f" command to create a proper /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.
Nope, haven't measured the temperatures, but as far as I've noticed, this high spinning fan behaviour only happens on X. Yesterday I turned the laptop on runlevel 3 and I didn't fired up X and haven't noticed any fan high speed, so it might be related to the AMD video driver on X.

Also, @pan64's idea is worth a try! :)

As you l know, hybrid graphics is supposedly a mean of adjusting power consumption to laptop's usage,

But that assume that you can disable the RADEON GPU when you don't need it.

Si I'd check if there is a way to switch it off, either with a physical switch, a BIOS setting or a user space command.

It would require a user space command of some sort, there's no physical switch and no BIOS setting to toggle the Radeon GPU.

Looking at a Ubuntu question here:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/19238...-inspiron-7520

The solution they gave was also to install AMD's catalyst drivers. However, they seem to require x86 support - have you installed multilib?

Also looking here:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...3/#post4695040

TobiSGD suggested passing nomodeset to the kernel during boot (in that post). Does that help at all?

Also see if there are any solutions here:

http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:har...aphics_drivers

Grep something meaningful, like fan, sensors, error, warning, or just read it all.

Dmesg should be the first line of resolution when troubleshooting a Unix-like system.

Your problem most likely is caused by incomplete power-management in the free radeon driver, this driver defaults to the highest clockspeed and fan settings. You can try if manually setting a lower powersetting withSince you have two videocards in that system it may be possible that you have to change card0 to card1 in those commands.