[ltp] Kick up the Fan - R50e Fan problems

[Thomas Renninger]

Hi,

sorry I just subscribed. I read the last thread in the archive:
Kick up the Fan.
but cannot reply ...:

a friend has a R50e and sever fan problems.

The temperature goes up very quickly on full performance.
He set the passive trip point to 80 C which works well with
the userspace governor, the ondemand governor seem to not
work that well with passive trip points and still raises frequency too often until
thermal shutdown.

However, the real culprit seems to be the fan control.
He said, when switching on the laptop after a thermal shutdown,
the BIOS is able to set the fan shortly faster at boot time than the operating system
does (should?).

I'd like to help getting fan control support for the R50e.
I read a bit of the DSDT code but couldn't find any fan related string :)

DSDT: http://www.renninger.de/acpi/dsdt.dsl - any hints are very welcome.
(seems as if my previous mail with the attached DSDT was filtert).

Thanks,

      Thomas

P.S.: How have you found out about the EC addresses and ACPI functions to use?
      Just grepping the DSDT and interpreting some ASL code?
      Or are there some specs that are worth reading?


Just some comments to the "Kick up the Fan" thread:

>> It can, you can make a daemon to look at the Temperature and halt if temp >
>> 90C

You can lower the passive trip point in /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/*/trippoints,
so that the kernel automatically scales down without the overhead of another daemon.
However, as stated above, this does not work perfect with the ondemand governor
(at least on the mentioned machine).

Maybe a solution for those who get shutdowns or have a bad consience
the powersave package (sourceforge) which I am a working on might help
(Unfortunately there are not many distributions working with it right now and you better compile/
install it from CVS. Let me know if anyone has problems).
It's on SUSE's default selection for more than a year, so it should work quite stable.

With this one you can set the thermal trip points (even change them, based on schemes (AC/battery schemes)
Control cpufreq policy (ondemand/userspace governor. If choosen userspace governor it controlles
your frequency according to the CPU load limit you give it and much more.

We are now working on brightness control, based on the various xxx_acpi modules.
If there would be more time, I'd like to implement more of the xxx_acpi module capablities,
help is of course very appreciated:
http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/maillist/subscribe.php?group_id=1438&list=powersave-devel (mailinglist subscription).
Just come around and ask ...