I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 running Gentoo with i8kmon running in daemon mode at boot time. It works quite well for the most part but I am getting some strange behaviors at low temperatures.

When i8kctrl temp reports around 45 the fan kicks into high speed for a couple of seconds before it goes completely off again. It almost seems as if something else is turning the fan on and then the i8kmon daemon is grabbing control again and putting the fan back to the state it should be.

Here is my /etc/i8kmon

set config(0) {{- 0} -1 50 -1 55}
set config(1) {{- 1} 40 70 45 75}
set config(2) {{- 2} 60 128 65 128}

Any help would be appreciated.

Start the service from the command line with the -v option to see what it post as it is working.

Brian

Took a bit but I managed to get a bit of output that shows an example of what I believe shows what is happening.

What was happening was the fan would go to highest speed but the output doesn't show i8k changing to state two for the highest speed. It does however show two instances of i8k reseting the fan to middle speed.

Any ideas what might be causing it to go to high speed?

I don't know. Maybe ACPI is placing call to the fan if it nears some kind of threshold or the computer bios is doing it on its own. Might email the developers of the i8kmon and see if they have any ideas or seen this before. If you figure it out please post back.

Brian