Fetching thermal information from HP servers

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 11:27:35AM +0100, Attila Nagy wrote:
> Any ideas what could be done to make the hardware sensors usable on HP 
> servers? I have a bunch of DL3xx, BL2xp, BL4xxc machines running FreeBSD 
> and all of them have:
> hw.acpi.thermal.tz0.temperature: 8.3C
> hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._PSV: 9.8C
> hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._CRT: 31.3C
>
> These values are constant on all machines, regardless of the number of 
> CPUs, the type and the load.

The sysctls remaining static is due to the BIOS vendor choosing to make
them static values, rather than tying them into the HWM hardware on the
board.  This is common on a lot of Asus consumer motherboards as well.
All you can do is complain to the system/BIOS manufacturer.

It ultimately depends on what HWM is on all of the above servers, and
whether or not utilities like sysutils/mbmon or sysutils/healthd (the
code between the two is very similar, with sysutils/mbmon being more
recent) can talk to the IC via old ISA I/O ports or via SMBus drivers.
This also depends on some BIOS code to be in place.

I'm in a similar boat with our Supermicro SuperServer 5015M-T+ boxes,
which use a Winbond W83627EHF IC for serial/lpt/floppy/etc. as well as
providing HWM capability.  I've been hacking on some code to talk to it
for a while via SMBus, and am having some mixed results.  (I'm probably
going to have to talk to Supermicro...)

If HWM is important to you enough to switch OSes, take a look at Linux's
lm-sensors framework (which is now in the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels), as it's
significantly more advanced than the above two.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |