[ltp] Re: [T410s] Fan running constantly

[Thomas Hartwig]

Hi Daniel,

I am sorry to say but from my long Thinkpad experience I know this is a
problem which persisted all the time in the history of all models. I
have investigated much time in alternative throttling, core disabling
and fan speed adjustments but in the end I have given up. Lenovo does
not put much effort in a design which might have a fanless running
available, at least for all the mid-pro models.
Even if you achieve some better results with (guarantee risky)
adjustments you will end up in an alternating (on/off)  fan. And this is
more annoying than to have it simply on all the time.
In general I am very curious to all ideas as well and as I said I have
spent a lot of testing in this area.
The last hope I have that there is sometimes a better possibility to
influence the speed of the fan. The smallest speed is still to noisy.

JM2C
Thomas

On 05/18/2011 07:57 AM, Daniel Näslund wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T410s. When the temperature, as reported by
> /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal, reaches a little over 40 degrees, the fan
> starts running and never stops. The temperature typically stays around
> 40-45 degrees even when the laptop is idle.
> 
> I have tried changing the settings in BIOS from 'Performance' to
> 'Balanced' for Config->AC power mode but no change in fan speed. I'm
> running the latest BIOS version as of today, 1.41.
> 
> I booted with acpi=off as suggested by [1]. The fan still spins at
> high speed and doesn't stop despite the computer beeing idle for ten
> minutes. Should I then assume that the T410s has a fan that is not
> controlled by acpi? (In that case, I'm a little surprised that all the
> /proc files associated with fan control shows up in the filesystem).
> 
> When googling, I find several forum posts describing the T410s fan as
> noisy when running Linux but it appears as  a non-issue for Windows
> users. Has anyone found a workaround? I've found [2] but I'm resistant
> to alter the behaviour of the fan without some feedback from other
> users.
> 
> I'm currently running 2.6.35-28 kernel supplied by Ubuntu. When executing
> 
>     git diff v2.6.35 -- drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.c
> 
> on an updated kernel tree I can see some changes but nothing that
> appears to be related to fan control. Has anyone used one of the more
> recent kernels and what are your experience with regards to fan speed?
> 
> Some data reported by proc:
> 
> $ grep . /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/*/*
> /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/cooling_mode:<setting not supported>
> /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/polling_frequency:<polling disabled>
> /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/state:state:                   ok
> /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/temperature:temperature:             44 C
> /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/trip_points:critical (S5):           100 C
> /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/trip_points:passive:                 85
> C: tc1=5 tc2=4 tsp=600 devices=CPU0 CPU1 CPU2 CPU3
> 
> $ grep . /proc/acpi/*/*
> /proc/acpi/ibm/beep:status:		supported
> /proc/acpi/ibm/beep:commands:	<cmd> (<cmd> is 0-17)
> /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth:status:		enabled
> /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth:commands:	enable, disable
> /proc/acpi/ibm/cmos:status:		supported
> /proc/acpi/ibm/cmos:commands:	<cmd> (<cmd> is 0-21)
> /proc/acpi/ibm/driver:driver:		ThinkPad ACPI Extras
> /proc/acpi/ibm/driver:version:	0.24
> /proc/acpi/ibm/fan:status:		enabled
> /proc/acpi/ibm/fan:speed:		4024
> /proc/acpi/ibm/fan:level:		auto
> /proc/acpi/ibm/hotkey:status:		enabled
> /proc/acpi/ibm/hotkey:mask:		0x078c7fff
> /proc/acpi/ibm/hotkey:commands:	enable, disable, reset, <mask>
> /proc/acpi/ibm/led:status:		supported
> /proc/acpi/ibm/led:commands:	<led> on, <led> off, <led> blink (<led> is 0-15)
> /proc/acpi/ibm/light:status:		off
> /proc/acpi/ibm/light:commands:	on, off
> /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal:temperatures:	43 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
> /proc/acpi/ibm/wan:status:		enabled
> /proc/acpi/ibm/wan:commands:	enable, disable
> /proc/acpi/ibm/volume:level:		unsupported
> /proc/acpi/ibm/volume:mute:		off
> 
> Daniel
> 
> [ 1] http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/acpi/debug.php
> [2] http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_control_fan_speed