Sony Vaio SZ61MN - no fanspeed control

Sony Vaio SZ61MN - no fanspeed control

[Sebastian Pohl]

Hi there!

In the process of havin multiple issues with acpi and drivers on my Sony 
laptop i stepped into another. The internal fan is always running at a 
fixed speed. If theres much CPU load it also speeds up. But i have no 
way to alter the speed. It always changes back to some sort of default 
value. Are there other ways to change the fanspeed than spicctrl with 
the sonypi module or direct echoing to the fan files made by the acpi 
stuff?

This could be dangerous for the hardware as it seems like it doesnt 
speed up to the highest level so the laptop gets very hot. Also it 
negatively affects the battery uptime.

Thanks!

regards

         sebastian

Re: Sony Vaio SZ61MN - no fanspeed control

[Mattia Dongili]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 09:08:53PM +0200, Sebastian Pohl wrote:
> Hi there!
>
> In the process of havin multiple issues with acpi and drivers on my Sony  
> laptop i stepped into another. The internal fan is always running at a  
> fixed speed. If theres much CPU load it also speeds up. But i have no  

the fan is controlled by the bios on most (all those that I know of)
vaios.

> way to alter the speed. It always changes back to some sort of default  
> value. Are there other ways to change the fanspeed than spicctrl with  
> the sonypi module or direct echoing to the fan files made by the acpi  
> stuff?

the bios doesn't expose any fancontrol feature, with sonypi or
sony-laptop you can use spicctrl or, with sony-laptop only,
/sys/devices/platform/sony-laptop/fanspeed to increase the fan speed for
a while but the bios usually brings it back to the required speed.

> This could be dangerous for the hardware as it seems like it doesnt  
> speed up to the highest level so the laptop gets very hot. Also it  
> negatively affects the battery uptime.

does the laptop shuts down because of overheating?
What temperature reading do you get from the acpi thermal zones?

cheers
-- 
mattia
:wq!