Fetching thermal information from HP servers

[Matthew Seaman]

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Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> 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.
> 

With HP kit you can also frequently get at the on-board sensors via IPMI
- -- kldload ipmi and install ipmitool from ports.

	Matthew

- -- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       Flat 3
                                                      7 Priory Courtyard
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Ramsgate
                                                      Kent, CT11 9PW, UK
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