[lm-sensors] Thinkpads still not supported?

[khali@linux-fr.org (Jean Delvare)]

David,

> > There's a kernel driver named "IBM ThinkPad Laptop Extras", it's
> > probably that. Never used it, I can't tell what it does exactly nor how
> > useful and reliable it is.
> 
> Thanks; I'll check that out.  Do you happen to know how I can find out
> what an acceptable GPU temp is on this thing, and/or what I can do to
> keep it under control?

No, sorry. I never had a Thinkpad laptop myself. Best is probably to
find someone else with similar hardware, and compare your numbers.

>                         The vesa driver runs it at 60 Centigrade at
> idle, which is already hot.  The ATI drivers all run it at 71 and
> above, which is scary (to me anyway).

I'd say it's high, but not scary.

> > No, don't worry. As long as you don't run sensors-detect 
> 
> Well, I did, before I found the admonition not to.  And I recall at
> some point last week, long before I ran sensors-detect, seeing a
> message at boot that the EEPROM had been corrupted or something (!) I
> think I may have installed something from my XP partition that
> corrected it (although I don't specifically recall a BIOS update), and
> I don't recall seeing it recently.

Nasty. These EEPROMs have a state machine bug which makes them
vulnerable, so other tools and OSes could corrupt it as well. However,
as far as I remember, the corruption cases that were reported to us
were fatal, in that the laptop would not boot anymore. Your case seems
to be different, but without additional details it's hard to come to any
conclusion.

> > and/or load random i2c and/or hwmon drivers, nothing bad will
> > happen. Just installing the lm_sensors user-space tools doesn't
> > represent any danger. As far as I know, ksensors can use other data
> > sources than lm_sensors (ACPI, hddtemp...) so it may still work.
> 
> Oh, then maybe I'll reinstall it; thanks!

Make sure your system won't load related drivers for you at boot time.
If you ran sensors-detect and let it create it's configuration file
(typically /etc/sysconfig/lm_sensors), the modules listed in that file
will be loaded at boot time, and you don't want this to happen. To be
safe, delete or blank that file.

-- 
Jean Delvare