[lm-sensors] Thinkpads still not supported?

[dave@boost-consulting.com (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 outdated info?)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