Bug 129413 - CPU fan never shuts down on ThinkPad A31p
Summary: CPU fan never shuts down on ThinkPad A31p
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: kernel
Version: 3
Hardware: i686
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Dave Jones
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2004-08-08 16:09 UTC by Dimitris
Modified: 2015-01-04 22:08 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2005-09-08 13:37:57 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Dimitris 2004-08-08 16:09:07 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040510

Description of problem:
The CPU fan on my A31p never stops running. It runs 24/7 at full
speed, no matter what the cpu load or temperature.

I suspect it is an ACPI issue since acpi doesn't seem to detect the
cpu fan at all.

The path: /proc/acpi/fan/, is completely empty. I've seen other
laptops have some kind of sensor information in there.

The problem is more evident when the laptop runs on battery, the fan
runs at full speed all the time and thus lowers battery life by 10%!

Running winblowz on the same machine shows that the cpu fan only comes
up at high cpu temperature.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
kernel-2.6.7-1.494.2.2

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. boot Fedora
2. listen to the fan spin
3. forever...
    

Actual Results:  fan spins constantly

Expected Results:  fan spins only when cpu is at a high temperature

Additional info:

Hardware:

IBM ThinkPad A31p
1 gig ram
80 gig hdd
2xDVD drives
ATI FireGL 7800 M7
Intel Pentium 4 2.0ghz

Software:
Fedora Core 2
kernel 2.6.7-1.494.2.2

Comment 1 Marcel van Osenbruggen 2004-12-24 13:49:04 UTC
Same with FC3. Also tested with other kernels... Probably simething 
in ACPI .... 

Comment 2 Dimitris 2004-12-24 14:06:41 UTC
Yup, indeed.

Maybe the IBM Power Management driver for Windowz takes care of that
under windoze. In that case, the cpu fan is software controlled and
not controlled by the BIOS or some hardware temperature thingy.

If the fan is controlled via software, then this is a dead issue. IBM
never releases any hardware information for their ThinkPads. One such
example is the lm_sensors util that kills ThinkPads, IBM never helped
solve the problem.

Comment 3 Dave Jones 2005-07-15 19:32:36 UTC
An update has been released for Fedora Core 3 (kernel-2.6.12-1.1372_FC3) which
may contain a fix for your problem.   Please update to this new kernel, and
report whether or not it fixes your problem.

If you have updated to Fedora Core 4 since this bug was opened, and the problem
still occurs with the latest updates for that release, please change the version
field of this bug to 'fc4'.

Thank you.

Comment 4 Dimitris 2005-09-08 13:37:57 UTC
The ibm-acpi project has managed to control the CPU fan, thus making it possible
to turn off and on the fan based on the CPU temperature.


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