[powerstation-owners] PowerStation Fans

[Stefan Nürnberger]

> Hi All
>
> I have a PowerStation running YDL 6.2 that overall I must say I am very
> happy with. If I could make it a bit quieter I would be even happier
> still ;-)
>
> The fan noise is fairly loud on light desktop operation (e.g. browsing,
> emailing etc). Periodically and very suddenly the fans can spin up to
> maximum speed even if the PowerStation is idle and will usually return
> to normal speed within about 30 seconds. Is this type of fan activity
> normal for the PowerStation? - perhaps other users could confirm.
>

Yes that's the normal behavior for the PowerStation.

>  From reading the mailing list archives I see that the issue of noise
> levels has come up from time to time but there appears to be no
> solution. I was just wondering if anyone has ever found a way of
> controlling the fans?
>

AFAIK the fans are controlled by the BMC. Communication with the BMC 
should be possible through IPMI. I was able to obtain readings from 
different temperature sensors this way, but did not find any fan control 
mechanism. I also think that it would not be very advisable to operate 
the CPUs at a higher temperature. The better approach would be to 
utilize the power management features of the processors. Unfortunately 
there was no cpufreq driver for the 970MP last time I checked. There was 
only some basic support for the 970FX in the linux kernel. It would be 
nice if someone could look into that. There is no need for the 
processors to run at full power when the system is idle. IIRC the 970MP 
has about 15 different power modes. Switching off unused cores 
completely would also be nice.

Unfortunately I have seen no work in that direction so far. I was 
wondering if there were some YDL kernel patches that are not in mainline.

Greetings
Stefan