[lm-sensors] Thinkpads still not supported?

[lm-sensors] Thinkpads still not supported?

[David Abrahams]

I see my model (T60p) in
http://lists.lm-sensors.org/pipermail/lm-sensors/2006-April/015983.html
Does that mean anything, or is
http://www.lm-sensors.org/browser/lm-sensors/trunk/README.thinkpad still the
latest news?

Thanks in advance,
--
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
http://www.boost-consulting.com

[lm-sensors] Thinkpads still not supported?

[Jean Delvare]

Hi David,

> I see my model (T60p) in
> http://lists.lm-sensors.org/pipermail/lm-sensors/2006-April/015983.html
> Does that mean anything, or is
> http://www.lm-sensors.org/browser/lm-sensors/trunk/README.thinkpad still the
> latest news?

It's completely unrelated. The hdaps driver reports the acceleration of
the laptop. It's meant to park the hard disk driver heads if the laptop
falls, for example. It will work on your laptop. But it's not a
hardware monitoring chip in the common sense of the term.

The SMBus is still blacklisted on IBM systems based on a PIIX4 chip.
Your laptop probably has a more recent chip (Intel 82801), but anyway
we've never seen a Thinkpad with a useable hardware monitoring chip as
far as I remember, so it's probably not worth investigating. If you
want to know the temperature laptop, try the "thermal" acpi driver
instead.

-- 
Jean Delvare

[lm-sensors] Thinkpads still not supported?

[David Abrahams]

Jean Delvare <khali at linux-fr.org> writes:

> Hi David,
>
>> I see my model (T60p) in
>> http://lists.lm-sensors.org/pipermail/lm-sensors/2006-April/015983.html
>> Does that mean anything, or is
>> http://www.lm-sensors.org/browser/lm-sensors/trunk/README.thinkpad still the
>> latest news?
>
> It's completely unrelated. The hdaps driver reports the acceleration of
> the laptop. It's meant to park the hard disk driver heads if the laptop
> falls, for example. It will work on your laptop. But it's not a
> hardware monitoring chip in the common sense of the term.
>
> The SMBus is still blacklisted on IBM systems based on a PIIX4 chip.
> Your laptop probably has a more recent chip (Intel 82801), but anyway
> we've never seen a Thinkpad with a useable hardware monitoring chip as
> far as I remember, so it's probably not worth investigating. If you
> want to know the temperature laptop, try the "thermal" acpi driver
> instead.

Thanks.  I think I may already have that.  "acpi -t" does display two
thermal zones.  Somehow my gnome-sensors applet is also getting a
reading for the GPU (in a category called "ibm-acpi"), which is
alarmingly high.

What I'm really after is much more at the application level; something
like "ksensors", which can help me keep the laptop running optimally
for whatever situation I'm in, and will let me switch between profiles
easily if I want battery life, performance, or etc.  However, the
ksensor package depends on lm-sensors, which according to that page
might be doing terrible things to my BIOS (any chance _that's_
outdated info?)  I already had ksensors installed, and it seemed to be
working OK, but took it out when I read that.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com

[lm-sensors] Thinkpads still not supported?

[Jean Delvare]

David,

> > The SMBus is still blacklisted on IBM systems based on a PIIX4 chip.
> > Your laptop probably has a more recent chip (Intel 82801), but anyway
> > we've never seen a Thinkpad with a useable hardware monitoring chip as
> > far as I remember, so it's probably not worth investigating. If you
> > want to know the temperature laptop, try the "thermal" acpi driver
> > instead.
> 
> Thanks.  I think I may already have that.  "acpi -t" does display two
> thermal zones.  Somehow my gnome-sensors applet is also getting a
> reading for the GPU (in a category called "ibm-acpi"), which is
> alarmingly high.

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.

> What I'm really after is much more at the application level; something
> like "ksensors", which can help me keep the laptop running optimally
> for whatever situation I'm in, and will let me switch between profiles
> easily if I want battery life, performance, or etc.  However, the
> ksensor package depends on lm-sensors, which according to that page
> might be doing terrible things to my BIOS (any chance _that's_
> outdated info?)  I already had ksensors installed, and it seemed to be
> working OK, but took it out when I read that.

No, don't worry. As long as you don't run sensors-detect 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.

About the Thinkpad issue, we made our best to limit the problems so
that EEPROM corruptions are very unlikely to happen again. But the real
reason for you not to try running sensors-detect or loading drivers is
that I am almost certain it won't work anyway, as the Thinkpad laptops
do not have any supported hardware. At least that was the case last time
people tried (a couple years ago, though.)

-- 
Jean Delvare

[lm-sensors] Thinkpads still not supported?

[David Abrahams]

Jean Delvare <khali at linux-fr.org> writes:

> David,
>
>> > The SMBus is still blacklisted on IBM systems based on a PIIX4 chip.
>> > Your laptop probably has a more recent chip (Intel 82801), but anyway
>> > we've never seen a Thinkpad with a useable hardware monitoring chip as
>> > far as I remember, so it's probably not worth investigating. If you
>> > want to know the temperature laptop, try the "thermal" acpi driver
>> > instead.
>> 
>> Thanks.  I think I may already have that.  "acpi -t" does display two
>> thermal zones.  Somehow my gnome-sensors applet is also getting a
>> reading for the GPU (in a category called "ibm-acpi"), which is
>> alarmingly high.
>
> 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?  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).

>> What I'm really after is much more at the application level; something
>> like "ksensors", which can help me keep the laptop running optimally
>> for whatever situation I'm in, and will let me switch between profiles
>> easily if I want battery life, performance, or etc.  However, the
>> ksensor package depends on lm-sensors, which according to that page
>> might be doing terrible things to my BIOS (any chance _that's_
>> outdated info?)  I already had ksensors installed, and it seemed to be
>> working OK, but took it out when I read that.
>
> 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.

> 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!

> About the Thinkpad issue, we made our best to limit the problems so
> that EEPROM corruptions are very unlikely to happen again. 

That's what the doc said; thanks for confirming.

> But the real reason for you not to try running sensors-detect or
> loading drivers is that I am almost certain it won't work anyway, as
> the Thinkpad laptops do not have any supported hardware. At least
> that was the case last time people tried (a couple years ago,
> though.)

OK.  Thanks for all the detailed attention; I really appreciate that
you took the time to educate me.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com

[lm-sensors] Thinkpads still not supported?

[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

[lm-sensors] Thinkpads still not supported?

[David Abrahams]

Jean Delvare <khali at linux-fr.org> writes:

> 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.

I finally did;
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t%304&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
is somewhat inconclusive.  Sounds like the Apple MacBookPro heat
debacle all over again, on a smaller scale.

>>                         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.

185 degrees Farenheit at idle doesn't worry you?  Well, that's good to know.

>> > 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.

I'm going back over to the dark side briefly to recover things, and
I'll install a BIOS update if necessary.  I'm still at a point with
this machine where I don't mind completely redoing my Linux install if
I have to.

>> > 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.

Like what?

> 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.

OK, will do, thank you very very much.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com

[lm-sensors] Thinkpads still not supported?

[Jean Delvare]

David,

> 185 degrees Farenheit at idle doesn't worry you?  Well, that's
> good to know.

Degrees Fahrenheit don't mean anything to me ;)

> > Make sure your system won't load related drivers for you at boot
> > time.
> 
> Like what?

Any module with "i2c" in its name, and the "eeprom" module.

-- 
Jean Delvare

[lm-sensors] Thinkpads still not supported?

[Rudolf Marek]

Hi all,

> The SMBus is still blacklisted on IBM systems based on a PIIX4 chip.
> Your laptop probably has a more recent chip (Intel 82801), but anyway
> we've never seen a Thinkpad with a useable hardware monitoring chip as
> far as I remember, so it's probably not worth investigating. If you
> want to know the temperature laptop, try the "thermal" acpi driver
> instead.
> 
and also the ibm-acpi driver because it has more temps.

Regards
Rudolf