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XPS 13 9350 fan control
Have the XPS 13 9350 running Gnome Ubuntu 15.04 and kernel 4.6.2. Things are pretty OK, or at least useful. One thing really annoys me though...
The fan seems to be controlled by BIOS, no way to actually control it from Linux. Using i8k/dell_smm_hwmon I can read fan values (mode + RPM) but it is not possible to set anything. Is that an issue? Yes, because every time the CPU gets a little hot my fan goes from speed 0 to 1, 0 to 0...with a frequency of about one Hertz. You get this REALLY annoying fan speed-ups/downs all the time. Why not just keep it at 1 until CPU is cool enough?!
Are there any remedies for this?
/PH
I actually found a solution for the annoying fan problem. As noted, the best solution is to not run the laptop too hot. It seems like the latest NVM patches can fix that.
My solution was to use the smm tool from i8kutils package to disable BIOS fan control and then let i8kmon handle the fans. The keiy was to disable the BIOS fan control from inside Linux. Now it works like a charm :)
Hello-World
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Posted October 25th, 2016 08:00
Can you explain how exactly you disabled BIOS fan control? I successfully installed i8kmon but don't know how to use it.
Is this change permanent? Will the BIOS also ignore fan control on other OS? I compiled smm but have no idea what to do with it now.
Thanks for youe help.
As stated, you must use smm tool from the i8kutils package. You will need to download i8kutils source code and build yourself. Doesn't depend on that much libraries, shouldn't be a hassle. You only need the smm binary. Then run
$ sudo smm 30a3
This should disable the BIOS fan control until the machine is rebooted. This is nothing permanent, a reboot restores the setting also, it is possible to re-enable BIOS fan control with
$ sudo smm 31a3
When fan control is disabled, use i8kmon daemon to control the fan. Works like a charm even though the temperature limits may need some tweaks.
I expect the machine to run cooler as soon as the latest NVMe patches find their way into Ubuntu kernels.
/PH
Hello-World
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Posted October 26th, 2016 02:00
Thanks. I already compiled it and just needed the command how to turn the fan off.
I also hope for the nvme patches. I assumed they would be in 4.8 and was disappointed when they weren't. Looks like they also won't be in 4.9. But I'll get them sooner or later since I'm on openSUSE Tumbleweed.
PS: I needed to install aumix as dependency and i8kutils from some home repository if any openSUSE user needs it (it's not in the default repos).
Hello-World
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Posted October 7th, 2016 13:00
push
I would not mind having the fan on more often if the CPU-Temp would be lower and the fan would not need to run with full strength.
Meaning I want to be able to control fan speed in some way. At least make it possible to set different modes in the BIOS which are more/less aggressive.