t42 archlinux fan noise

[Arian Kuschki]

Hi all

I have been using Ubuntu for a couple of years on an x31 and a t42
without any problems. But now I switched to Arch Linux and for some
reason then fan on my t42 is always running around 3500 rpm even when the laptop is
idle for hours (cpu load < 5%). Only very seldomly does it go down to
3000rpm.

I know there are programs like fancontrol to control fan speed, but I
was wondering how Ubuntu manages to regulate the fan speed natively. After
all support for fan regulation on ThinkPads is built into the Kernel
right? This would the preferred route for me because of efficiency and
lower risk.

Does anybody know how Ubuntu handles the Thinkpad fan out of the box? If
there is no other way but to run a script to control fan speed, which
one do you recommend? Under Arch Linux I think fancontrol is the
preferred option. And also, if I have to adjust fan speed manually,
where can I find information about critical temperature thersholds for a
t42.

Thanks in advance.
Arian
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[Damien Challet-4]

> I have been using Ubuntu for a couple of years on an x31 and a t42
> without any problems. But now I switched to Arch Linux and for some
> reason

it is probably reason which cause the idle temperatures to rise.

> then fan on my t42 is always running around 3500 rpm even when the laptop is
> idle for hours (cpu load < 5%). Only very seldomly does it go down to
> 3000rpm.

what gives acpi -T, or even better

cat /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal ?

use also powertop to check the likely cause of this.

You should also use hpet=force in /boot/grub/menu.lst which helps keeping the
CPU idle.

Finally, you can try to  undervolt your CPU if you do not mind a hard crash
every 3 months.

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[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh-2]

On Mon, 26 Oct 2009, Arian Kuschki wrote:
> I have been using Ubuntu for a couple of years on an x31 and a t42
> without any problems. But now I switched to Arch Linux and for some
> reason then fan on my t42 is always running around 3500 rpm even when the laptop is
> idle for hours (cpu load < 5%). Only very seldomly does it go down to
> 3000rpm.

What is the output of "cat /proc/acpi/ibm/fan" ?

What is the output of "grep . /sys/module/thinkpad_acpi/parameters/*" ?
(might need to be run as root).

> I know there are programs like fancontrol to control fan speed, but I

Which you shouldn't use unless you have a real need for them...

> all support for fan regulation on ThinkPads is built into the Kernel

ThinkPads have fan regulation in firmware, they need absolutely no help
whatsoever from the kernel or from any application to regulate the fan as
long as you leave it in "auto" mode.

This is not true on thinkpads that have hardware defects that cause the CPU
to heat up way too much and trip one of the defenses ("thermal trip
points").  These require help from the kernel "thermal" driver to work
right, and we have had bugs in that area in the past...  many of them
related to BIOS bugs, BTW.

The kernel driver (thinkpad-acpi) allows you to override the firmware fan
control if you need to for some reason (or if you don't agree with the
decisions done by the firmware -- this is my case, I like more aggressive
cooling to start well before my CPU hits 70°C).  Do notice that once you
tell the firmware that you want the fan at a given level, it will remain
there.  This can cause hardware damage if anything inside heats up too much.

Distros REALLY should not be enabling any fan control application by
default!  It is something that only the local administrator is supposed to
do.

> Does anybody know how Ubuntu handles the Thinkpad fan out of the box? If

It leaves the fan control alone by default, as it should.  At least AFAIK.

Do notice archlinux might have screwed up cpuidle or C-state control, or the
GPU power management, all of which would mean your thinkpad is running a lot
hotter than it otherwise would.

> there is no other way but to run a script to control fan speed, which
> one do you recommend? Under Arch Linux I think fancontrol is the

Look in thinkwiki.org.  I recommend using no continuous fan control script
whatsoever, and binding a hotkey to kick the fan to level 7 (and back to
level AUTO) when you need some extra cooling or don't need extra cooling
anymore.

Make sure you are using the latest T42 firmware (BIOS and EC).

> preferred option. And also, if I have to adjust fan speed manually,
> where can I find information about critical temperature thersholds for a
> t42.

These are not documented.  And sometimes they are NOT constant (I do think
they are constant on the T4x, though... but I am not _sure_ about it).

--
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  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh
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[Robert Tomsick]

On Tue, 2009-10-27 at 12:44 +0100, Damien Challet wrote:
> > I have been using Ubuntu for a couple of years on an x31 and a t42
> > without any problems. But now I switched to Arch Linux and for some
> > reason
>
> it is probably reason which cause the idle temperatures to rise.

Check for stuck/busy-waiting daemons, etc.

I've seen various programs get stuck (esp. when I've been doing some
patching/hacking) and burn CPU.  Kinda easy to forget about the various
background daemons until something happens to one of them.

> You should also use hpet=force in /boot/grub/menu.lst which helps keeping the
> CPU idle.

Just a note: although there are a number of Intel chipsets that can be
coerced into supporting HPET (via the aforementioned hpet=force) option,
no all of them have had said support validated by Intel.  Although I've
never seen that option cause any issues, it could (in theory) adversely
affect system stability or data integrity by forcing your chipset to do
something that it doesn't fully support.  (That said, I've run an X40
with that option for quite some time and had absolutely zero
problems...)

> Finally, you can try to  undervolt your CPU if you do not mind a hard crash
> every 3 months.

Undervolting doesn't need to cause instability.  Just be sure you
actually test your setup thoroughly before assuming a given
voltage/frequency pair is stable.  ("Thoroughly" varies from user to
user, of course.  For me, a "thorough" test takes about two hours of
100% saturation for each voltage/freq. setting.)

-Rob

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[Arian Kuschki-2]

On Tue 27, 20:09 +0000, Robert Tomsick wrote:
> Check for stuck/busy-waiting daemons, etc.
> > You should also use hpet=force in /boot/grub/menu.lst which helps keeping the
> > CPU idle.
> > Finally, you can try to  undervolt your CPU if you do not mind a hard crash
> > every 3 months.

Thanks for the reply. Just to make sure I understand right, all these
tips are meant to lower CPU load, or not? But it appears to me that my
problem is not CPU load. I looks to me as if my CPU is rather idle and
my CPU temperature is quite low. What puzzles me is that despite of this
my fan is always around 3700.

Or did I get this wrong?
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[Arian Kuschki-2]

On Tue 27, 12:44 +0100, Damien Challet wrote:

Hi Damien
thanks for your reply.


> what gives acpi -T, or even better
>
> cat /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal ?

a ~$ acpi -t
Thermal 0: ok, 52.0 degrees C

a ~$ cat /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal
temperatures:   52 46 30 63 31 -128 29 -128

a ~$ cat /proc/acpi/ibm/fan
status:         enabled
speed:          3673
level:          auto

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[KUNIAKI MIHARA]

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I recently purchased an IVEA USB wireless mouse thru amazon.com for my eeePC 900A which runs a GNU-based LINUX out of the box. Other than it took a while for me to discover the USB receiver is kept on the bottom of the mouse and must be pulled out and inserted into a USB port, I am very pleased with the product and its performance. The USB receiver looks like a mouse glide pad - it is tiny! The product is shipped with no instructions or directions. The box in which the mouse was packaged was blank on all six sides.

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[Damien Challet-2]

> cat /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal ?

a ~$ cat /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal
temperatures:   52 46 30 63 31 -128 29 -128

52 degrees is quite high, so there is a (few) process(es) preventing the cpu
from idling. powertop is you friend there. This temperature should be around
40C while idling.

Note as well the 63 in the line above, this is the GPU temperature. Make sure
that you have activated powersaving options for it.

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[Arian Kuschki]

After installing laptop-tools and cpufreq and adding them to my start up
daemons my temperature when idle is down to 41 degrees and the fan is at
around 3000. I vaguely remember at least laptop-mode to be active in
Ubuntu by default, so that may explain the difference I experienced.

I will investigate the other options that were suggested, e.g. powertop,
but for now I am happy that the fan is significantly quieter.

Thanks everybody for your help
Arian

On Wed 28, 10:47 +0100, Damien Challet wrote:

> > cat /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal ?
>
> a ~$ cat /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal
> temperatures:   52 46 30 63 31 -128 29 -128
>
> 52 degrees is quite high, so there is a (few) process(es) preventing the cpu
> from idling. powertop is you friend there. This temperature should be around
> 40C while idling.
>
> Note as well the 63 in the line above, this is the GPU temperature. Make sure
> that you have activated powersaving options for it.
>
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[Arian Kuschki]

Contrary to what I said, enabling laptop-mode and cpufreq alone did not
have as strong an effect as I had first assumed. There seems to be an
small positive effect though.

>You should also use hpet=force in /boot/grub/menu.lst which helps keeping the
>CPU idle.

The thinkwiki says to use lspci to check for an ICH5 chipset. According
to the wiki

>The ICH4 does have an HPET, but it is disabled for a good reason: Intel
>didn't test/validade it! Use of the ICH4 HPET is not recommended

a ~$ lspci | grep -i intel
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82855PM Processor to I/O Controller (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82855PM Processor to AGP Controller (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 81)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DBM (ICH4-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DBM (ICH4-M) IDE Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 01)
02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82540EP Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Mobile) (rev 03)
02:02.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter (rev 04)

It does not specify anything for the processor, but several other
components seem to be ICH4. I assume this means I should not try
hpet=force? Then again a couple of lines further down, it says:

On modern ThinkPads the HPET timer is automatically detected and
enabled. On certain older machines hpet=force is required such as on the
following machines:
T30, T40, T40p, T41, T41p, T42

Which one is the right statement then?


> temp4:       +62.0°C

>This is not "idle temperature".  That's your problem.  And I think it
>is the >GPU, so either archlinux is doing a screwed up job of GPU power
>management OR you are now keeping it busy, e.g. by using a compositioning opengl
>window >manager.

I use dwm as my wm which is fairly resource friendly. But setting

Option      "DynamicClocks" "on"

in my xorg.conf seems to have changed my idle temperature for the GPU
from around 60 to 49-50. The fan is now 3000 when idle, which is audible
but still very comfortable. It does not compare to the ultra quiet x31,
but well...

Thank you for pointing me to the high PGU temperature issue, this really
has decreased the fan noise.

Cheers
Arian

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[Robert Tomsick]

On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 15:38 +0100, Arian Kuschki wrote:

> >You should also use hpet=force in /boot/grub/menu.lst which helps keeping the
> >CPU idle.
>
> The thinkwiki says to use lspci to check for an ICH5 chipset. According
> to the wiki
>
> >The ICH4 does have an HPET, but it is disabled for a good reason: Intel
> >didn't test/validade it! Use of the ICH4 HPET is not recommended
>
> a ~$ lspci | grep -i intel

[--snip--]

>
> It does not specify anything for the processor, but several other
> components seem to be ICH4. I assume this means I should not try
> hpet=force? Then again a couple of lines further down, it says:
>
> On modern ThinkPads the HPET timer is automatically detected and
> enabled. On certain older machines hpet=force is required such as on the
> following machines:
> T30, T40, T40p, T41, T41p, T42
>
> Which one is the right statement then?

Technically they're both right.  While it's true that Intel doesn't
officially support HPET on the ICH4, the chips themselves do indeed
support it.  I've never heard of anyone losing data due to it, and I
myself have been running my X40 with that option for several months with
nary a problem.  If you're really concerned about it you can skip it,
but it generally seems to be a fairly safe, albeit "unsupported" option.

-Rob

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[Damjan-2]

> Do notice archlinux might have screwed up cpuidle or C-state control, or the
> GPU power management, all of which would mean your thinkpad is running a lot
> hotter than it otherwise would.

ArchLinux keeps it's software as much vanilla as possible.
The latest kernel 2.6.30.5 has only one patch adding aufs2 (as a module)
and another changing the boot logo.


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