Fan driver for Linux

The forum for non-component-related silent pc discussions.

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cube
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Joined: Wed Aug 13, 2014 12:55 am

Fan driver for Linux

Post by cube » Sun Aug 28, 2016 11:50 am

I hope you'll forgive a boast thread, but someone might find it useful. Also sorry for copying the readme, but for some reason I wrote it to say exactly about what the software does :-)

It's called PySystemFan and it's a fan manager for linux machines (focused on silent running, of cause).

PySystemFan assigns several thermometers (accessed through hwmon interface in /sys or using smarctl for harddrives) to each fan and regulates its speed so that all of the temperatures are at or below a specified setpoint. If your system has too powerful fan for the heat it generates (minimum fan speed is too much cooling for the set temperature and no fan is not enough cooling), this software can also prevent fan from frequently stopping and starting by exponentially increasing (up to a limit) time it waits before the fan is stopped. As a side effect of smartctl based drive temperature measurements PySystemFan also has to spin down drives in case of inactivity instead of relying on the HDD firmware, because my WD reds counted temperature polling as access (this is optional).

PySystemFan not 100% finished yet, but it works already. It's being tested (as in running 24/7 for the last few months) in a small NAS system built in my custom case. Exponential fan-off backoff is still being tweaked, the other features seem to be working well. What's missing is mostly in the front end and packaging departments.

PySystemFan is written in python 3 with no dependencies outside standard library. smartctl and hdparm commands are needed to measure temperatures of harddrives and to spin them down. The code is Linux specific now, but should be reasonably simple to extend to other unixes (as long as the OS has a way to measure temperature and control a fan).

Feedback is appreciated :-).

CA_Steve
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Re: Fan driver for Linux

Post by CA_Steve » Sun Aug 28, 2016 12:42 pm


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