F16 Fan Speed Problem

[JonR]

F16 on Toshiba Tecra M5. XP partition also present. Virtualbox installed on F16. Following the Virtualbox installation the fan now runs at full speed all the time. CPU core temps at only 38C.

As soon as the machine boots F16 the fan goes to full speed but if I boot XP it works properly. It worked fine on F16 until I installed Virtualbox.

Is it possible that one of the Virtualbox kernel modules has broken the fan control? Anyone have any other ideas? Any help appreciated.

[glennzo]

Stop the VirtualBox services and see if the fan returns to normal speed.

[JonR]

vboxballoonctrl-service, vboxdrv & vboxweb-service are all stopped. Fan runs full speed immediately after F16 reboot and without having run vbox.

Of course, vbox may be a complete red-herring. It may be something else entirely causing it which just happened along as I was installing vbox... stumped.

---------- Post added at 12:55 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:37 AM ----------

on boot into F16 the fan runs full speed immediately after grub finishes - it looks as though the kernel load triggers the fan full speed. Have done a full update, now running 3.3.0-8.fc16.x86_64.

[zuser]

No solution I realize but Toshibas are notorious for fan speed issues running Linux. I have owned a Satellite for over 2 years and this has always been an issue running several different distros. Earlier kernels (around 2.6.28) would work with certain cheat codes in grub but even this has not helped lately. Have been running openSUSE since 11.1 and have not found a good solution.

Currently, fan control is very eratic, ie it may not start, may start full speed or may start with cpu at 70+ C as indicated by ksensors. If fan does not start when system booted cold, cpu temp will continue to rise to unacceptable level. If I shut down at 70+C and reboot, fan will usually start and function correctly.

System is setup to dual boot with win7 oem install and must say fan works perfectly and quietly running win7. Apparently fan speed is controlled entirely by the operating system, not bios and Toshiba has made no effort to facilitate use of Linux on the hardware.

[JonR]

I've tried using acpitool to set fan=0 but it makes no difference.