Hardware monitoring for Intel Atom D945GCLF.

Jeremy Chadwick koitsu at FreeBSD.org
Mon Aug 11 23:45:47 UTC 2008


On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 12:37:52AM +0200, Eugene Butusov wrote:
> Hi,
>
>   Is there a way to make use of hardware monitoring on Intel 945GCLF  
> (with Atom 230 cpu)?
>   It is relatively new child of Intel, but maybe someone figured it out 
> yet.
>
>   pciconf -lv shows this:
>
> ichsmb0 at pci0:0:31:3:    class=0x0c0500 card=0x464c8086 chip=0x27da8086  
> rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
>     vendor     = 'Intel Corporation'
>     device     = '82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller'
>     class      = serial bus
>     subclass   = SMBus
>
>   Modules ichsmb and smb are loaded, /dev/smb0 is present, but mbon and 
> lmmon don't give any results.

The board in question is here:

http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/motherboards/D945GCLF/D945GCLF-overview.htm

The Technical Product Specification also does not mention any H/W
monitoring IC in the Block Diagram (see section 1.1.3):

http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/d945gclf/sb/e35968001us.pdf

Section 1.11 mentions support for Hardware Monitoring via "WfM", and
Section 1.11.1 states that such statistics are available via SMBus
(which is the more important part).  More on that in a moment.

Secondly, re: lmmon: no surprise.  It's very, very unlikely your Intel
board will contain an LMxx IC; lmmon is specifically for older
motherboards (read: mid-to-late 90s) which use LMxx series ICs.  There
are some present-day AMD boards which use dual LMxx ICs, but it's not a
common thing.

Thirdly, mbmon doesn't particularly use SMBus in the way you think it
would, and I'm betting use of -I will either fail, report fake values,
or crash your system, since I don't think any of the features are
available on the ISA bus (good riddance).

See my H/W monitoring project for FreeBSD:  http://bsdhwmon.parodius.com/

I'm presently focusing on Supermicro boards.

Regarding your board, I found this on Intel's site:

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/CS-012552.htm#sdk

* Developing Applications to Read Thermal Information
  Intel does not offer any development kit or API for application
  development that will allow you to read a board.s thermal values.
  However, there are 3rd party tools that you may find helpful.

I don't need an API, but this kind of statement makes Intel sound like
they're not willing to disclose the SMBus offsets for monitoring.  I
might have to look at lm-sensors from Linux, but that code is very
difficult to follow.  I'm not sure if Intel gives this sort of
information out publicly, but I sure hope so.

You might be able to get CPU thermal statistics by looking at sysctl,
but I know absolutely nothing about the Atom CPU (if it behaves like a
Core2Duo, then the coretemp(4) driver might work with it, or might need
to be modified to work with it).

-- 
| 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 |



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