Linux – Sometimes the CPU fan does not start

arch linuxfanthinkpad

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad X240, and it works well and on normal temperatures. However, sometimes the fan does not start even when running high stress processes that warm up the CPU drastically. In these situations when I put the device to sleep and start it up again, everything goes back to normal, the fan starts and cools the CPU down quickly. How to investigate this problem? Can this be a hardware issue?

I am running Arch Linux and I have thermald enabled.

Best Answer

The problem that you are getting might be a hardware issue the same problem what you are facing now one of my friend got. Sometime his fan isn't running and sometimes it is working fine It was happening because of dust or may be a fan issue.

what I did to solve the issue.

First I cleaned it with blower gun then when it wasn't started then I slightly pushed the cpu fan with a needle (be careful while nudging remove the needle quickly) then the fan suddenly started and worked fine for few months.

after that he faced the same issue solved by replacing fan.

I think it will not be a OS issue. If it is the everytime you suspend your CPU fan should not start.

Related Solutions

Linux – System heating up since recent installations

After some researches, deep in the AUR, in the world of crazy Arch developers, I found an very probable answer to the question.

As excepted, the problem comes from the use of the Open Source driver, which power management (and therefore, CPU usage/temperature) is horrible. For these reasons, and under those circumstances of mine, xf86-video-ati and friends should never be used. However, the big issue is that the catalyst package is no longer supported with Xorg 1.14. Usually, you would have to downgrade Xorg, and stop it from upgrading. I did differently.

There is the procedure I followed :

I downloaded yaourt and its AUR dependency package-query (which requires yajl from the official repositories), and stored the tarballs in my home directory for further use.
I reinstalled Arch Linux from scratch, because using xf86-video-ati brought a lot of dependencies to most of my applications, especially Skype and Chromium. I think that's the best thing to do to keep it clean. I kept /home away from the pacstrap installation, and re-mounted it before generating the fstab file.
Once the system was ready (base-devel installed, configurations done), I installed package-query and yaourt, in order to download catalyst-test, the wonderful package made by our Archers. There may have been some dependencies there, I don't remember everything. Important notice : installing this package will require the re-compilation of linux kernel headers. Even if yaourt takes care of that, the computer heated up pretty high during the package compression.
With catalyst-test installed, I followed the basic instructions for the ATI Catalyst driver (Arch Wiki) : generate the configuration with aticonfig --install, blacklist the radeon driver, make sure the fglrx module is loaded on boot (/etc/modules.load/catalyst), disable KMS (nomodeset in the kernel parameters), regenerate the GRUB configuration with grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg, reboot. At boot, make sure the fglrx module is loaded (lsmod | fglrx), and that the direct rendering is activated (fglrxinfo).
I reinstalled my packages. Most of my configurations where untouched because I kept my /home directory away from the pacstrap process on reinstall.

With this driver, I've noticed a significant lowering of my temperatures, even if I still have some configurations to do (laptop-related issues) :

Resetting cpupower.
Resetting laptop-mode-tools.
Apply powertop tunable items configuration.

A huge round of applause to the Arch Community, and thank you.

Linux – Restart fan manually in Linux

Using the following line allows me to restart the fan without suspending my laptop.

echo disable | sudo tee /proc/acpi/ibm/fan; sleep 5; echo enable | sudo tee /proc/acpi/ibm/fan

Thanks to @Stephen Harris

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – System heating up since recent installations

Linux – Restart fan manually in Linux

Related Question