Fan speed control?

[SBier]

The wifi on my Euclid drops out five or ten minutes after boot. I'm guessing it's a thermal issue, since I've had problems before with wifi cards that got flaky when hot.

How do you configure the Euclid fan to target a lower temp, or just to run the fan at 100%? Would it be a BIOS option, like on the NUC? Holding DEL or F2 during boot doesn't get me to a BIOS screen.

[MartyG]

A Euclid user with a thermal issue recently reported that you can check the internal temperature of your Euclid in the Euclid interface (10.42.0.1/# system/status) : "System status" in the "Utilities" tab. The Euclid's data sheet document says that it is rated to handle a maximum of 35 degrees of air temperature when operating and 60 degrees when switched off.

Internal temperature can also be generated by heavy load on the processor. You can check what programs the system is currently running and how much resources they are consuming with the System Monitor interface of Ubuntu.

Regarding accessing the BIOS, I couldn't find official confirmation of this in documentation and the BIOS activation key can apparently vary depending on what BIOS is installed on a particular manufacturer's PC. Until there is official confirmation, you could try pressing a different function key on bootup, from F1 to F12. One user on a Euclid question on this forum suggested that F5 worked for them, so maybe you could try that first.

[SBier]

Thank you for the reply.

F5 does bring up the BIOS, and there is a "Thermal" tab, but most of the options are disabled, and the names of the other ones seem to suggest they handle power throttling.

lmsensors shows that the CPU tends to top out at 80C under load, and watching /proc/cpuinfo seems to indicate that the system would rather reduce CPU frequency than increase fan speed. This is not what I want! I would much rather the machine run the fan than slow down.

The fancontrol package can't seem to find any fans that can be controlled. ("/usr/sbin/pwmconfig: There are no pwm-capable sensor modules installed") Is there any other way to control the system fan? Otherwise I would have to add an external fan, which would be disappointing.

[MartyG]

If you have already tried fancontrol then I'm not sure what to suggest as I'm not a Euclid specialist. So I will link MeitavKleinfeld from the Euclid development team into this discussion. Other Euclid experts who may see this are welcome to please offer their thoughts too, such as amitmoran

[Daohua_W_Intel · Accepted solution]

you can try to control the fan manually:

sudo service thermald stop

sudo chmod a+w /sys/class/pwm/pwmchip0/pwm0/duty_cycle

sudo echo 10000 > /sys/class/pwm/pwmchip0/pwm0/duty_cycle //100% full run

or

sudo echo 5000 > /sys/class/pwm/pwmchip0/pwm0/duty_cycle //50%

or

sudo echo 0 > /sys/class/pwm/pwmchip0/pwm0/duty_cycle //stop the fan

[SBier]

Hi Howard.

Thank you for your reply. This does exactly what I was looking for! However, even with the fan running at 100%, the wifi is still flaky, so either the wifi module isn't being cooled well enough, or it's a software problem.

Thanks, Sam.

[Bolous_A_Intel]

Hey,

We have a configuration file for the thermal / Fan control. it can be found here:

/usr/share/commonsense-configs/thermald_configs/thermal-conf.xml

You can adjust the thermal thresholds or the target RPM of the fan, by increasing the slope you should get better cooling and keep the device in lower temperatures, yet it might become noisier.

Please try this solution, please feel free to ask for more information.

Thanks,

Bolous.

[SBier]

Hi Bolous.

Thank you for your reply. Editing thermal-conf.xml doesn't seem to affect fan speed. When I run `sudo service thermald status` after boot, it indicates that it isn't running, and `ps aux | grep thermald` doesn't find it either. Is thermald supposed to be running by default?