[ltp] T43 vs. T42 fan activity? (And: Advocacy for more Linux support?)

[Ramon Cahenzli]

Hello everyone,

I recently bought a T43, more as a test machine to see if my employer would invest in a few more of these. In Windows, fan activity seems to be less than in Linux (2.6.11.7, Debian Sarge), but we've been through that whole subject elsewhere on the list so I'll try not to go back to that.

The readings I get from ACPI show 50 - 60 degrees C most of the time. If the fan is left off, it climbs to over 60 degrees quickly. Even having the system completely idle and cpufreq set to "powersave", resulting in an 800 MHz frequency on my 2 GHz machine, won't make much difference. The fan is constantly on and at an annoying volume, and you can't even blame the machine because it just does what it's instructed to when its insides get this hot.

My question is if anyone has compared T43 vs. T42 fan activity and temperature in Linux. Is the T42 much better? I don't have a T42 to test with, but I think I'll try to trade my T43 for a T42 anyway since suspend to disk will not work on the T43 in the foreseeable future. The hard disk is only available through libata's SCSI emulation. The swsusp2 docs say that SCSI is not yet supported and make no mention of whether it will be. I don't want to swap for a T42 just to find out it's so noisy and hot I can't work on that, either.

Where to we need to knock to get this fixed? Is it ATI's graphics card without PowerPlay driving system temperature up, IBM's BIOS, the Linux kernel? Any place we could ask for assistance nicely? I apologize if I missed a petition or other related activities, though googling through the list archives I couldn't find anything related, except for the ATI driver petition which I've signed.

The workarounds posted in places, like the shell scripts that turn the fan on and off when the machine reaches a certain temperature, are good and probably the only thing we can do at the moment. But giving us the tools to solve the problem at the root would be much better. I'm willing to put in some time talking to this and that person at IBM and going through unpleasant phone calls if it helps. We will buy 5 or 6 of their laptops soon. It's not a big account (yet), but since 100% of those will run Linux maybe I'd have a few good cards on my hand anyway.

Thanks

Ramon