Saturday, 20th April 2024
Comment posted Controlling fan with Thinkfan on Lenovo Thinkpad R61 on Debian GNU/Linux (adjusting proper fan cycling) by .
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Tags: central processing unit, cpu cooling fan, daemon, debian gnu, dpkg, fan control, hard drive, lenovo thinkpad, Linux, obstacles, package updates, squeeze, suprised, thinkpad r61, tiny article
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 20th, 2024 at 11:44 am and is filed under Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100723 Linux Mint/9 (Isadora) Firefox/3.6.8
I put your edited conf file on my T43 and edited crontab. Made the difference, thanks!
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/531.2+ Debian/squeeze/sid () Epiphany/2.29.92
Heya,
I’m glad it worked out for you I guess,
View CommentView Commentthis configurations should be also good to properly rotate the fan of many other Thinkpads like the many
other T series thinkpads (T61 etc) as well as probably many others from the R series
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; pl; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3
There are some attention-grabbing deadlines on this article however I don’t know if I see all of them heart to heart. There may be some validity but I’ll take maintain opinion till I look into it further. Good article , thanks and we want extra! Added to FeedBurner as well
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/531.2+ Debian/squeeze (2.30.6-1) Epiphany/2.30.6
Hi,
One more thing in my post recommend to use a cron similar to:
0,30 * * * * killall -HUP thinkfan
A good tip here is to set to this cron line also the output of it to go to /dev/null for example:
0,30 * * * * killall -HUP thinkfan >/dev/null 2>&3
If you don’t place the cron by redirecting standard error and warning messages to /dev/null then on your physical console you will experience a very annoying messages from the thinkfan restart.
Hope that helps
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1
Hi. My recent upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10, which now has DejaDup built-in quite nicely as its backup tool, caused me to discover that my T500 is running too hot – in fact, when doing a backup it frequently shuts down because it’s reached 100C. I discovered all this gradually from looking at the logs for the reason for the shutdown, then googling and finding a lot written about ThinkPads overheating with Linux.
So, having understood the issues better, and played with setting different values to /proc/acpi/ibm/fan, I realised I needed a utility to automatically manage temperature and Thinkfan seems perfect (well, actually, the perfect solution would be for the Linux kernel to manage temperature better but I can’t make that happen!).
I noticed, when playing with setting “level” in /proc/acpi/ibm/fan, that the value of “disengaged” causes the fan to run at about 5000rpm, whereas level 7 only results in around 3500rpm. By the way, before I touched any of these things, it never went about about 3100rpm.
My problem is that Thinkfan has a series of fan speeds that one sets in the conf file, of which the maximum is 7, which on my machine results in a fan speed of 3500rpm. During a backup, this still wasn’t enough to keep the machine cool – some of the sensors still reached well into the 90s before I stopped the backup. With the fan manually controlled to 5000rpm (i.e. “disengaged”), the temperature remained in the 60s and 70s.
Do you know why Level 7 doesn’t result in the maximum fan speed? Is there anything I can do in Thinkfan to access the higher speeds automatically when needed?
It’s a potentially very useful tool – thanks for sharing it.
Alan
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/531.2+ Debian/squeeze (2.30.6-1) Epiphany/2.30.6
If you experience this odditiy only during backup creation. It might be nice to check out
View CommentView Commentionice command and run the backup to be transferred to your notebook with “ionice -c 3”.
You can also set the fan speed to level 7 every one minute via cron maybe this will help.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/531.2+ Debian/squeeze (2.30.6-1) Epiphany/2.30.6
tell me if you come up with solution. I’m very interested to hear how things went.
best!
View CommentView CommentGeorgi
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1
Hi – yes – thanks for these ideas. I’ve just played with setting ionice to 3 (I hadn’t come across that possibility before) and also setting nice to 19, to reduce it’s priority all round. I tried another backup the temperature was still well into the 90s. I guess as not much else was running lowering priorities wasn’t going to make much difference.
My biggest puzzle is why setting Level 7 doesn’t drive the fan at full speed as it’s supposed to. I think if Thinkfan could somehow persuade the fan to go at full speed (rather than the 3500rpm that seems to correspond to Level 7), my troubles would be over!
Thanks again for your suggestions.
Alan
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/531.2+ Debian/squeeze (2.30.6-1) Epiphany/2.30.6
What I don’t get is your fan level speed showing set to 7 when you cat the /proc/acpi/ibm../ ?
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1
Yes – to answer your question – cat /proc/acpi/ibm/fan does show level 7 and the fan speed is about 3500, which is consistent with my various tests. The only setting I’ve found that drives the fan faster is “level disengaged”.
So, in a spirit of adventure, I’ve made a very small mod to your code, adding a line that tests for a new level 99 in the config file which I’ve set to cover the range 70 to 999. In the code where the level is set (in system.c in the function setfan_ibm()) I’ve copied the code you have that sets “level disengaged” if cur_lvl == INT_MIN, adding a line that also checks for cur_val == 99, and also setting “level disengaged” in that case too.
Now, when I do my backup, the fan quickly notches up to level 7 (3500rpm) and then after a couple of minutes as the temperature rises, sets “level disengaged”, which puts the fan speed to 5000rpm, which manages to keep the temperature in the low 80s, rather than the high 90s as before.
If I only understood the purpose of “level disengaged”, I’d be happy!
(By the way, this is the first C code I’ve ever compiled on a Linux system – I’ve been writing Java for so many years now. I was surprised how easy it was.)
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/531.2+ Debian/squeeze (2.30.6-1) Epiphany/2.30.6
Yep, compiling on Linux is a piece of cake. Good you made it to decrease your CPU temperature. Still 80 degrees is too high temperature and if your CPU works for too long time under this temperature its scheduled live will decrease tremendously.
try to set a root crontab to execute on cron:
echo level 7 > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan >/dev/null 2>&1
from cmd line quickest way under root (if you don’t have other crons running) would be:
# echo ‘*/1 * * * * echo level 7 > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan >/dev/null 2>&1’ | crontab –
best!
View CommentView CommentGeorgi
Mozilla/5.0 (Ubuntu; X11; Linux x86_64; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1
Just a note since I haven’t seen this anywhere else:
Setting the fan level to 64 boosts the speed on my W500 up to 5000 RPM and actually cools down my machine.
Here are the sensor values I’m currently using:
(3, 0, 40)
View CommentView Comment(5, 35, 60)
(7, 54, 68)
(64, 65, 32767)