How to add sensors and cooling devices to thermal-conf.xml

sensors

I have a Toshiba NB510-108 netbook with Xubuntu 14.10 installed. Under Windows 7 Starter, temperature sensors show values up to 45 degrees Celsius. Under Xubuntu, they show values up to 55 degrees.
I would like to use thermald to keep the temperature at 38 degrees.

My thermal-conf.xml file only contains one sensor of type TSKN and two cooling devices of types rapl_controller and intel_powerclamp.

sensors -u shows this

    user@user-TOSHIBA-NB510:~$ sensors -u
    acpitz-virtual-0
    Adapter: Virtual device
    temp1:
      temp1_input: 42.000
      temp1_crit: 110.000

    coretemp-isa-0000
    Adapter: ISA adapter
    Core 0:
      temp2_input: 43.000
      temp2_crit: 100.000
      temp2_crit_alarm: 0.000
    Core 1:
      temp3_input: 43.000
      temp3_crit: 100.000
      temp3_crit_alarm: 0.000

Can anybody please tell me how to add the above sensors to thermal-conf.xml, and maybe also how to locate and add other cooling devices?

Best Answer

I'm new on this stuff as well ( just installed ) anyway I'll try to share what I have understood.

In short

Thermald can control cooling via active or passive cooling devices as presented in sysfs (path /sys/class/thermal/).
If you know you have any other devices that the ones listed in /sys/class/thermal/, you can add manually:

The best cooling method may not be in the thermal sysfs. In this case
thermal-conf.xml  can  be  used  to  bind a zone to an external cooling
device.

-> in the config you can specify a path to a device: <Path></Path>

Debug and other info

At the moment the best resources looks to be:

1 man thermald
2.man thermal-conf.xml link
3. Ubuntu Wiki: Thermald

Ubuntu documentation provides and example /etc/thermald/thermal-conf.xml that you may want use instead of the default config.

To understand what is going on the first step is to launch the daemon in debug mode:

sudo service thermald stop
sudo thermald --no-daemon --loglevel=debug

On my Ubuntu (using the wiki config file) I can see the daemon automatically adds the sensors from sysfs.
Try to check the first lines of the debug log, you should see something like this:

thd_read_default_thermal_sensors 
sensor_update: type acpitz
sensor_update: type acpitz
sensor_update: type pkg-temp-0
thd_read_default_thermal_sensors loaded 3 sensors

In accord with your sensor -u print I cannot see any active cooling device ( fan ):

  • It looks that sensor was not able to find any software controllable fan, so I'm not sure what other methods you can add ...
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