[HN Gopher] The minimum viable fan control script
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The minimum viable fan control script
Author : hddherman
Score : 47 points
Date : 2022-09-26 06:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ounapuu.ee)
(TXT) w3m dump (ounapuu.ee)
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| suprjami wrote:
| Literally the day after I spend hours figuring out thinkfan and
| tinkering with fan levels to get something I can live with. What
| timing.
| buescher wrote:
| I was expecting a basic thermostat with hysteresis, but no, it's
| a stepwise proportional control. Your fan could very well wind up
| oscillating at one of the step transition points which is
| probably not great for the fan.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Your sanity will suffer more than the fan.
| buescher wrote:
| Well, there's that, but the audience is people who will write
| their own fan control script...
| 10000truths wrote:
| If this is a realistic failure mode, one would hope that there
| is some kind of rate-limiting at the firmware or driver level.
| _wolfie_ wrote:
| > if ((temp > 90000)); then
|
| What is this syntax? I would have assume something like `[ $temp
| -gt 90000 ]` or `$((temp > 90000))`. Is the dollar here optional?
| Is this something bash specific?
| scbrg wrote:
| > Is this something bash specific?
|
| Yes.
|
| http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ArithmeticExpression#Arithmetic_C...
| mortenlarsen wrote:
| There is no need to call cat to read from a file.
|
| > temp=$(cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone1/temp)
|
| temp=$(</sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone1/temp)
| 0xCAP wrote:
| A classic example of cat abuse in my book.
| elsyx wrote:
| Definitely an unwarranted cat call.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| meow
| piperswe wrote:
| IMO the cat version is more readable, and any performance
| difference should be negligible
| bullen wrote:
| I have spent countless hours trying to get hardware to be silent.
|
| The only way to do this reliably and without fire hazard is to
| passively cool the hardware completely by having HUGE heatsinks
| and THEN you can add a fan that you slow down with a resistor.
|
| The fan is only there to prolong the life span, the hardware
| should be able to run passivley at 100% and you should be able to
| hold your finger on the heatsink forever. If not you have a
| problem.
|
| All other solutions are just meaningless.
|
| http://streacom.com
| onli wrote:
| How silent are you talking? Silent under load is hard, but
| quiet under load and silent on idle is possible without a
| passively cooled build. A good cooler for the processor + slow
| running case fans + a silent psu (like BitFenix Formula,
| Corsair RM, ...) + a noise isolating case against coil whine
| would be the foundation for that. I use an old Corsair H90 to
| cool my i5-5675C, AIO radiator is installed in the front of the
| case, there is one good case fan at the back. Note that the H90
| is only quiet when pump speed gets also reduced. With that
| setup, the noise under load is completely defined by the gpu (a
| soon to be exchanged RX 570) and the noise of the system on
| idle vanishes in the ambient noise.
|
| However, the setup I describe above was loud until I got around
| to control the fan speeds properly. Turned out the MSI BIOS
| fanspeed control did not work properly. On top of high minimal
| speed settings (like 50% for the case fan) it ignored my cpu
| fan settings and ran the fans higher than I wanted. That made
| the system rather loud even on idle and unbearable under load.
| The solution was to control fanspeed with fan2go:
| https://github.com/markusressel/fan2go (plus radeon-profile
| controls the speed of the gpu, making it silent on idle as
| well.)
|
| Fan2go is not only nice to use, it also solves the issue the
| article's author will run into in the future: Those hwmon paths
| are not stable anymore. It's possible they will work on his
| hardware if there is only one (or none, as in the thinkpad
| example using a different system), but otherwise the script
| will stop working with new kernels after reboots.
| dvdkon wrote:
| Today's hardware can scale performance and power consumption by
| orders of magnitude, I find that solutions that allow quiet
| day-to-day operation and loud power when needed _are_
| meaningful.
| wwwigham wrote:
| I run a media server with 100% passive cooling.
|
| Case is a small form factor case:
| https://hdplex.com/hdplex-h1-v3-fanless-computer-case.html
|
| You actually paste heat pipes from the CPU to the case itself,
| using the large fins on the case as a massive heat sink.
|
| Inside I have an Intel Core i7 10700 and 2 Samsung 970 Evo Plus
| 2TB SSDs. Works fantastically as a media server, under near
| constant hardware transcoding load.
| mellavora wrote:
| My son built a small project where he tried to control the
| speed of a computer case fan with a (variable) resistor,
| shunting a % of the power to ground. Didn't work very well. The
| fan either ran full speed or not at all.
|
| So he used a 555 chip to turn the setup into pulse-width
| modulation, with the variable resistor (pot) adjusting the
| pulse width.
|
| Worked like a charm.
| gigaflop wrote:
| 4-wire PC fans are usually PWM controlled. That might be why
| the first attempt didn't go well, if he didn't try multiple
| fans.
| rollcat wrote:
| An M1 Mac Mini is silent even at considerable load, out of the
| box; the fan policy can be tweaked with a free app
| (MacsFanControl); also I've never seen it eat more than 30ish
| watts (even when playing games). It's definitely not a budget
| solution (I mean the price is fair for the performance, unless
| you don't need $700's worth of horsepower), and macOS could do
| much better as a server solution, but it's definitely worth
| considering.
|
| Mine is both a desktop/workstation, and actually doing various
| "server" duties like running Prometheus+Grafana, SSH jumpbox,
| etc. Bonus? You can actually SSH in while it's sleeping - it
| will wake up the system, but not the screen(s).
| XiS wrote:
| As an alternative, been using this PID fan control script to keep
| my HDDs cool for ages.
| https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/pid-fan-control...
| francis-io wrote:
| I've some a similar thing with my NAS on a Supermicro X10 (I
| think) on Linux. I have had all kinds of trouble getting quiet
| fans on this board under Linux. I think it's a mix of BIOS fan
| control and other things that I ended up sinking days into
| trying to solve. Right now my solution is flaky at best, but
| eventually the fans spin down after a reboot.
|
| Supermicro could be so good for "prosumers" but I feel like
| they are bogged down by historic garbage. I had to pay (crack)
| something in the BIOS just to use a feature.
| c_o_n_v_e_x wrote:
| On some server motherboards, fan control is done by the BMC.
| We license BMC firmware from AMI for our servers. The fan
| control algos that come included are very basic (similar to
| the proportional response the auth wrote).
| nicolaslem wrote:
| Me too! And it does not only keep HDDs cool but even more
| importantly it keeps them at a constant temperature. At this
| point the script should be shipped with TrueNAS directly.
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(page generated 2022-09-27 23:02 UTC)