Thermal problem on Compaq Armada E 500

[Boris Hollas]

Hello,

I have the following problem on 5.4-R with my Armada E 500:

After switching on, the fan starts and keeps running even at 0% CPU load,  
albeit at low speed. sysctl hw.acpi.thermal tells me that tz0 ist not  
active and tz0.temperature is about 27 deg Celsius, which is very cool.

Interestingly, the fan will be switched off if it has been running at  
higher speed once. tz0.temperature is about 40 deg Celsius if the fan is  
not running. After booting Windows, the fan will run at highest speed for  
one second and then switch off. To switch the fan off manually, I  
therefore tried to set hw.acpi.thermal.active to levels 0,1 or 2, which  
had no effect. I always get the message

/home/boris# sysctl hw.acpi.thermal.tz0.active=0
hw.acpi.thermal.tz0.active: -1 -> -1

The only method I have so far to switch the fan off is to run some  
CPU-demanding program and to kill this after the fan has been running at  
higher speed.

The output of sysctl hw.acpi is

hw.acpi.supported_sleep_state: S1 S3 S4 S5
hw.acpi.power_button_state: S5
hw.acpi.sleep_button_state: S1
hw.acpi.lid_switch_state: NONE
hw.acpi.standby_state: S1
hw.acpi.suspend_state: S3
hw.acpi.sleep_delay: 1
hw.acpi.s4bios: 1
hw.acpi.verbose: 0
hw.acpi.reset_video: 1
hw.acpi.cpu.cx_supported: C1/0 C2/100
hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest: C1
hw.acpi.cpu.cx_usage: 100.00% 0.00%
hw.acpi.acline: 1
hw.acpi.battery.life: -1
hw.acpi.battery.time: -1
hw.acpi.battery.state: 7
hw.acpi.battery.units: 3
hw.acpi.battery.info_expire: 5
hw.acpi.thermal.min_runtime: 0
hw.acpi.thermal.polling_rate: 10
hw.acpi.thermal.tz0.temperature: 27.0C
hw.acpi.thermal.tz0.active: -1
hw.acpi.thermal.tz0.thermal_flags: 0
hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._PSV: 90.0C
hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._HOT: -1
hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._CRT: 103.0C
hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._ACx: 80.0C 70.0C 50.0C -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1

The BIOS dates from 2002, enabling or disabling apm make no difference.