fan noise on imac g5 rev C

[Daniel Armstrong]

On 5/21/07, Pavel Zaitsev <pavel-XHBUQMKE58M at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Daniel Armstrong(dwarmstrong-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org)@Mon, May 21, 2007 at 07:20:36PM -0400:
> > I guess what I am looking for is a script that will periodically read
> > that cpu-temp file so that the fans stay off *unless* it reaches some
> > maximum temp, upon which the fans will kick in until it reaches some
> > minimum temp or duration of running time. Is this something that you
> > would use cron to run?
>
> No, you would run this script in daemon mode or in background, it loops forever.
> There is a patch in the first node on the google thread you posted, I belive it is a pre-release patch from development tree to deal with these incompatible fans. reading from 2.6.17 sources:
>

Thanks for the hint!

I ended up installing Ubuntu-7.04-PPC on this iMac, which came with
the 2.6.20-15-powerpc64-smp kernel... and even on this newer kernel
the thermal fan runs at a full and noisy clip... *until* I cat the
cpu-temp file. This appears to be a known problem with this particular
model of iMac (G5 rev C), and I don't think a patch actually exists
that fixes it.

Maybe when I learn a bit about shell-scripting I will fashion
something more elaborate... but in the meantime I simply setup a
cronjob to:

cat /sys/devices/platform/windfarm.0/cpu-temp

...every minute and... it works... fans are quiet, my hearing is
starting to return! :-)

I monitor the temperature and it never appears to get above 62C max...
most of the time it is several degrees less...

I have compiled a few kernels before, but never went out and grabbed a
patch and applied it to kernel source... I will have to investigate
how to do that.

Thanks again for the help...
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