How to properly control your Lenovo Thinkpad R61
fan rotation cycles on Linux with ThinkFan
Since quite a long I'm issuing issues with my fan rotation
controlling software on Linux.
That is really annoying since every now and then I experience
problems with overheats when my system is under heavy loads.
That would interrupt my proper work with my notebook every now and
then and had became a real pain in the ass with time.
I spend a lot time looking for a solution in the meantime trying
all kind of scripts which mentioned on
thi nkwiki.org
I've had an unpleasent experiences with
tpfand ,
tp-fancontrol
as well as with the automated process to control fan through some
kern el module options like:
options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1
To solve my overheating issues when the temperature shown by
lm-sensors was reaching 60
degrees and above I had to manually change the
fan rotation
level with the command :
# increase thinkpad fan speed to max
root@noah:~# echo level 7 >
/proc/acpi/ibm/fan
The manual way to increase fan rotation when my CPU was under a
high load caused by the automated thinkpad_acpi kernel module
wrongly controlling the fan speed was really irritating, therefore
I looked for something online to manage the fan rotation to cool my
cpu in a proper way, after the many failed attems to use some of
the forementioned softwares as well as other techniques I found to
be explained as a workarounds to tune the automated fan rotation
speed.
I finally found
Thinkfan . The
wonderful guys from Debian has even prepared a packaged deb package
of thinkfan, so as a debian user the whole
thinkfan
installation was as easy as:
root@noah:~# apt-get install thinkfan
Though thinkfan worked just fine most of the time and was able to
control my fan speed automatically quite properly most of the time,
it failed to do so every now and then.
Since failures to adjust properly the fan rotation speed on my
Debian Linux when the system was under a stress was rare, I was
quite happy with
thinkfan as a fan manager for my desktop
linux system most of the time.
The most often cases in which thinkfan failed to properly adjust
my fan speed to cool my cpu properly was after system sleeps or
hibernate
To work around this issue I have created a crontab which would
periodically restart the thinkfan daemon, the crontab I used is as
follows:
# restart thinkfan on every 30 minutes to prevent issues with
thinkfan after hibernate and sleep on Debian Linux
0,30 * * * * /etc/init.d/thinkfan restart >/dev/null
2>&1
This kind of solution worked until recently when I have used
apt-get to upgrade my system software to the latest
versions, ever since then thinkfan misbehaving unabling to properly
control my notebook lenovo thinkpad r61 fan speed.
The failure to control properly the fan speed was accompanied by
the following
thinkfan warning messages in /var/log/messages
:
Jun 7 15:30:02 noah thinkfan: WARNING: Using default
temperature inputs in /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal.
Jun 7 15:30:02 noah thinkfan: WARNING: You have not provided any
correction values for any sensor, and your fan will only start at
55 °C. This can be dangerous for your hard
drive.
I spend almost two hours Googling for the error and possible
articles on how to configure my
thinkfan /etc/thinkfan.conf to
match my thinkpad r61 fan control but I couldn't find anything
meaningful in Google.
Thus I started experimenting changing values in my
/etc/thinkfan.conf until I reached a moment the fan is
properly controlled by thinkfan.
I thought this values could be of a great benefit to other
Thinkpad R61 Linux users I decided to blog about my issues
and my solution to fan control issues.
So if you are also in the same struggles with properly configuring
the fan speed for thinkfan to match Thinkpad model R61, you will
have to
download my thinkpad
r61 Correction values thinkfan.conf file
Our you can either just copy paste the following in your
/etc/thinkfan.conf configuration file on your system:
(0, 38, 40)
(1, 42, 44)
(2, 46, 48)
(3, 50, 52)
(4, 54, 56)
(5, 58, 60)
(6, 62, 64)
(7, 66, 32767)
For other Lenovo / IBM Thinkpad model types the correction values
might be close or even it's possible that the same configuration to
control your fan with thinkfan might be compatible with other
Thinkpads.
If you test it on another thinkpad and you find it working or some
tweakenings to the up-mentioned correction values help in tuning
thinkfan on other Thinkpads, please post here!
Thanks God, now after simply restarting my thinkfan, my notebook
fan is automatically properly set to rotate!