Thinkstation P700 #215
Replies: 16 comments 1 reply
-
Yeah, the The easiest way to find out is to install the sudo apt install lm-sensors
sensors If that lists any fans with their current RPM, there's a good chance that driver also supports PWM fan control. Take a look in If you can find no such thing, you might still have a chance because sometimes these hardware monitoring devices can't be auto-detected and the drivers have to be loaded manually. The |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
Output of
This however is more interesting
|
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
hm, usually there should be something behind the SMBus controller, but there might not be a Linux driver for it. Usually these system integrators deploy it with some halfway sensible default config and then they don't deem it necessary to support software control. Maybe you'll find some info on the chip in the detailed mainboard specifications. Then you could find out if there is a driver for some other, similar (e.g. older) chip from the same manufacturer and then contact the developer of that driver to extend support to your chip. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
What I find strange is that Lenovo themselves say that the machine is Linux certified and none of the Certified versions shows fan control at all. The other thing however is that looking at documentation from the machine and other Lenovo Thinkstations it would seem that fan speed control is not possible from the OS itself and would have to be set static at BIOS which is a bit of a bummer. https://www.thinkworkstationsoftware.com/index.html?view=codes |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
Yeah, one of the reasons I build my desktop systems from scratch. I get to choose a mainboard with properly documented components and I can make sure that the hardware monitoring chip is actually supported in Linux (i.e. with an open source driver in the mainline Linux kernel). These certification programs tend to be a lot of smoke and mirrors. I wouldn't consider the system supported if you have to download some driver DVD. Usually what that means is their drivers are too crappy to qualify for inclusion into the Linux kernel, which means they'll only work with the horribly outdated Linux kernel they were certified for. But sometimes you're lucky and open source development overtakes the legacy bubble created by the certification bullcrap. So if you're currently running Ubuntu LTS or RHEL/CentOS, I'd recommend trying out a distribution that isn't already outdated on release day, like Fedora, Arch or whatever. The current Linux kernel release is 5.6, and a big bunch of new hardware monitoring drivers came in a few releases ago. If you're still somewhere at 4.* there's a good chance that a more recent kernel might help you. Just make a USB boot stick with a recent Fedora and try out the lm-sensors stuff in there. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
oh btw, I wouldn't think that this "fan speed" setting just sets a fixed fan speed. It should be a more or less agressive fan control curve that gives you more headroom before thermal throttling kicks in, at the price of more noise under load*. So if you have that option definitely give it a try, it might do pretty much what you want without having to use thinkfan. *edit: So noise when the system is idle should (hopefully) stay the same. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
Fedora 32 live USB didn't help even after installing |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
Set fan level 3 out of 7 at BIOS/BOOT and loaded up CPU with stress test on 24 threads and all 12 cores [room temp 26C) operating at 2.6GHz
at level 7 I know from exp CPU would be 40C at this stress level. It would seam that fans are really set at a static level and that's that. After stress test it came to more normal levels but fan speed at the same level as before.
|
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
Taking into account all previously shared and the following document from Lenovo I strongly suspect that the fan speed is static and not minimum. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
OK well that sounds pretty useless indeed. It may be worthwhile to talk to customer support, if only to make them aware that this is not adequate support for a high-end workstation. But maybe they can help you find out more about the hardware monitoring chip being used so you could be able to get the developer of a related driver to add support for your chip. In principle, you could also look over the mainboard and just google the labels on all the ICs to find it. But all of that is of course a long shot. Depends on how much you really need active fan control. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
It is not so much that I need active control of fan speed but that I'd like the machine to have dynamic control of its fans, something I cannot see happening, thus the need for active control |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
Hey, I just stumbled across this: https://github.com/hirschmann/nbfc |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
Hi - I got pointed at this and I can't answer for the platforms listed but one of my team got fan control working on the P720 and that might be useful as a starting point? On the P720 control is done via the NCT6685D eSIO chip, so the nct6683 driver is needed. However when you try and load that you get a bunch of ACPI warnings about SystemIO range. You can bypass this by adding "acpi_enforce_resources=lax" to the kernel bootargs. We then had an updated /etc/sensors3.conf file (attached as a .txt file) Then the sensors command worked....and I think you should be able to do fan control. Let me know if it helps - I'm guessing completely that the same eSIO chip is being used so the above might all be useless. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
Looking at the specsheet of the P700 it does seem to use the same NCT6683D eSIO chip It seems to match as it detects the driver as
|
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
How do you then control the fans? Using Thinkfan? |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
On an M900 I had to force the kernel to load the nct6683 driver as stated here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lm-sensors/+bug/1858369 (comment 4) |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
In reference to the closed item #52
On a Thinkstation P700 folder
/proc/acpi/ibm/thermal
does not exist./sys/devices/platform/coretemp.*/
exist but those don't show any fans nor fan control whatsoever.Lenovo does say this machine is certified for Linux [Ubuntu and CentOS] but neither seems to show fan control as my experience shows and the following link shows
Looking at Lenovo website re drivers nothing relevant shows re Linux Fan control:
Extract from Device Drivers update - DVD-ROM ISO image version for ThinkStation P500, P700, P900
Would be nice to know if fan control is possible under Linux for this platform and which kernel modules need to be loaded.
thinkpad_acpi
does not load.Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
All reactions