High fan speed with no reason

For a few weeks, the fans of my Lenovo B590 laptop, running on Xubuntu 14, turn to high speed a few minutes after it is turned on. The fans won't speed down until I turn the computer off.

This is quite strange, since

This didn't happen before

The temperatures are quite low (are they ?)

$sensors
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +36.0°C  (crit = +88.0°C)
temp2:        +30.0°C  (crit = +126.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +37.0°C  (high = +72.0°C, crit = +90.0°C)
Core 0:         +34.0°C  (high = +72.0°C, crit = +90.0°C)
Core 1:         +31.0°C  (high = +72.0°C, crit = +90.0°C)

thinkpad-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
fan1:           0 RPM

pkg-temp-0-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +37.0°C 

$sudo hddtemp /dev/sda
/dev/sda: ST500LT012-9WS142: 33°C

The computer is under low load:

top - 08:30:15 up 16 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.28, 0.23, 0.23
Tasks: 197 total,   1 running, 196 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.8 us,  0.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 98.7 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   3607944 total,  1973956 used,  1633988 free,    99660 buffers
KiB Swap:  3744764 total,        0 used,  3744764 free.   789936 cached Mem

The BIOS is up to date (and there are no fan settings in it)

The fan is clean and dust-free

Why would the BIOS turn the fans to high speed where there seem to be no reason for that ?

It seems that we cannot control the fan manually with this model, so I guess the only solution is to understand why this happens.

Klaus

Posted 2014-06-10T15:33:55.473

Reputation: 443

@Klaus: What do you mean by "This didn't happen before". Before what? OS upgrade? Switch from Windows to Linux? BIOS update? – mpy – 2014-07-16T21:12:56.690

Try a live CD - if this still happens then my guess is that a sensor has gone bad. – harrymc – 2014-07-17T05:22:16.187

@mpy It seems to have appeared out of nowhere. I tried a clean install, but the problem is still there. – Klaus – 2014-07-17T05:37:17.083

@harrymc But doesn't sensors indicate that the sensors measure rather low temperatures ? – Klaus – 2014-07-17T05:39:15.383

Sensors support is sometimes very sketchy, so such indications are not conclusive. – harrymc – 2014-07-17T05:44:26.087

Check the BIOS to see if it has settings for allowing dynamic fan speed. I have seen some systems that had fan settings in the BIOS that either allowed direct control from the BIOS or set what could control the fans. – Mike Naylor – 2014-07-22T15:47:32.757

1linux ACPI power management implementations are hit and miss with many laptop bioses. consider yourself lucky that it has your fans on high, rather than low. I had a laptop I couldn't do anything serious with becuase ubuntu couldn't tell the HP bios to spin them up when needed, so they never ran above low, even at a coretemp above 80C. HP of course would not relase a bios that had powermanagement configuration available. – Frank Thomas – 2014-06-10T16:06:10.580

I have a laptop which does the same: I can't remember whether hibernating cured it, but my Lenovo has not exhibited the problem. Apart from the hardware, the main differences are that the Lenovo has UEFI and 64-bit Ubuntu. Both are running 12.10. – AFH – 2014-06-10T18:04:04.747

@AFH What do you mean by whether hibernating cured it ? – Klaus – 2014-06-10T19:15:30.467

It was configured to hibernate when the lid was closed, which stopped the fan: I can't recall if the fan came back to full speed when I resumed. I don't often use it now, so I have had no recent incidents. If your Lenovo is configured to hibernate, it's worth checking if this will reset it: it's a lot quicker than rebooting. – AFH – 2014-06-10T21:12:07.367

High fan speed with no reason

Answers