ThinkPad Controlling Fan.
I wrote this package for my business laptop Lenovo t61p which gets very hut more then usual. I did a lot of research on this subject. T61p has some issues with the fan speed and critical temperature. Critical temperature is set to 125 degrees which is a way too much. When I reach 70 the system slows down so badly and it starts being useless. Fan speeds for temperature range is incorrect too; there are several levels from 0-7. 0 is off "the fan stops spinning", between 1-7 there is not any difference, speed is about 3300 rpm which is not sufficient for high temperatures such as above 70. System never sets full speed, it actually always stays auto.
It could be one of two reasons, bios or kernel, but I would say both of them,
I found some software which can handle critical temperatures but couldn't get this working for my kernel and os. So it was a priority to do something about this very quickly and tpcfan has born.
This soft should work for all thinkpad laptops. You can set you critical temperature which I set on default 60 degrees, then when you reach it, tpcfan switch to level disengaged which gives you full speed and keep spinning till temperature drop down 5 degrees below.
# cat /etc/conf.d/tpcfan.conf # define update interval in seconds update_interval = 10 # specify critical temperature critical_temp = 50 # specify fan level to switch to when cpu reach critical temperature critical_fan_level = disengaged # cool down n degrees from critical temp cool_down = 5
This is how you start looks like
# /etc/init.d/tpcfand start * Caching service dependencies ... [ ok ] * Starting tpcfan ... [ ok ]
and stop switching to level auto, that just in case.
# /etc/init.d/tpcfand stop * Stopping tpcfan ... switching fan to level auto [ ok ]
Emerge via my overlays http://www.maugustyniak.com/2010/07/02/my-gentoo-overlay-misiek303/ and let me know with any issues you may have.
Eventually temperature dropped down from 70s to 40s by cleaning fan and radiator ;) so do it first ;)
