Created attachment 44266 [details] The output of sensors-detect Hello, I am using Debian unstable (Linux 2.6.37, xorg 7.6) on a Toshiba L500 laptop -which has a built-in AMD Radeon HD 4650 graphics card - and am experiencing serious fan noise with xf86-video-ati driver (6.14.0). The GPU fan seems reasonably quiet when first starting the computer, but after a while of moderate desktop usage, it suddenly spins up extremely - presumably to maximum speed - and remains there until I reboot; the fan seems to never be spun down by the operating system. With the propietary fglrx driver, however, fan speed seems to be controlled properly, without sudden spin-ups and with spin-downs on idleness. (But that driver has other problems and I would like to use a Free Software driver.) There seems to be a thermal control chip (i2c) for the Radeon card, and the appropiate drivers seem to be loaded: # lsmod | grep radeon radeon 682777 2 ttm 44440 1 radeon drm_kms_helper 22085 1 radeon drm 152653 4 radeon,ttm,drm_kms_helper i2c_algo_bit 4105 1 radeon i2c_core 16549 6 radeon,drm_kms_helper,drm,i2c_algo_bit,videodev,i2c_i801 power_supply 7683 3 radeon,battery,ac I have also run lm_sensor's sensors-detect tool, answering every probing question with YES, but it only recommended me the "coretemp" driver (which I have enabled, but as expected it did not change anything). I have attached the output of sensors-detect if that helps.
Laptops generally expose the GPU temperature via an acpi thermal zone. For more information about the power management option in the driver, see the "KMS Power Management Options" section of this page: http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
(I also added this comment to the corresponding kernel bugzilla bug I opened. Feel free to close one of these two bugs however you see appropiate.) I am aware of the power management options you pointed to, but they don't help with the fan problem (at best, they delay it slightly). /sys/class/thermal does not contain any thermal zones, there are only two CPU-related cooling devices and an LCD cooling device listed there: $ ls /sys/class/thermal cooling_device0 cooling_device1 cooling_device2 $ cat /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device0/type Processor $ cat /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device0/device/path \_PR_.CPU0 $ cat /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device1/type Processor $ cat /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device1/device/path \_PR_.CPU1 $ cat /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device2/type LCD $ cat /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device2/device/path \_SB_.PCI0.P0P2.VGA_.LCD_ Does that mean it is an OEM-specific sensor? Why is it that fglrx can control the fan just fine then? (Or does fglrx have code specific to certain hardware vendors?) How I can find out more about how the GPU fan is controlled with this laptop?
Closing this bug in favor of the one at Kernel Bugzilla [1]; this is a problem in the in-kernel driver, not the Xorg one. [1] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30922
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