# Toshiba fan neither recognized nor speeding up on overheatin

## Manu311

Hello,

I've been having this issue for a really long time and I'm unable to fix it.

My Toshiba Satellite Pro L770-14n is overheating with just too instances of "yes" on more recent kernels and pstate.

If I disable pstate, it took quite some time to overheat (I was emerging stuff with -j5) - but I assume this is caused by not reaching as high frequencies (which might be wrong).

So the main problem is, I can't find any driver to drive the fan, and it seems to be controlled by the bios itself. Coretemp can read out three temperatures and those values seem to be correct. Gentoo will shutdown once those reach 80°C, if I rmmod coretemp, it takes more time until the bios shuts down the notebook.

The unique point for all those cases is, that the fans never reach even close to maximum speeds. Multiple things are capable of reducing my cpu frequencies so the overheating takes more time.

So my wish would be to have my fan spin at higher frequencies if the temperatures heat up, but I don't know how. I've tried multiple live-cds to test out standard-kernel-configurations, I've also enabled a lot of modules in my own kernel to try those out - nothing allowed me to control my fans.

The only thing left I can think of, would be a bios-update, since I'm running on 1.80 and there is 2.30 (if I downloaded the correct one). However there's a little problem there too: It requires Windows. I never had Windows installed on this notebook, I currently don't have enough space to install it and I would prefer to not having to. Dos is also not an option since all the exes and exes in exes and even the exes in exes in exes (zip-ception) instantly terminate if run from within a Dos-environment complaining about "Can't run inside Dos" or "Require Win32".

Also Bios-updates are usually the "I don't know what to do, I'll recommend a bios-update"-thingy. I assume there's a chance that the bios will regulate the fans better if I do that update, but I couldn't find a changelog or similar either (do those exist for bios updates?).

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## Telemin

Hi there,

Have you made sure that you have exhausted all possible options for detecting PWM fan control chips?  By this I mean building all possible kernel modules and running sensors-detect to see if anything shows up that you can control with fancontrol (also part of lm_sensors).

I presume there is no changelog or similar for what the bios update actually does, so I agree it is a shot entirely in the dark.  The most likely thing that is brings is windows 8 support I would imagine, given the age of the machine.

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## Manu311

I'd assume there are multiple bios-versions between 1.8 and 2.3 - so win 8 support might not be the only thing that changed.

As I said I enabled a lot of modules on multiple occasions and always tried sensors-detect. Usually most (other) distributions also distribute everything they can on their kernels (and their live-cds) which I tried a bunch of too. Nothing ever controlled the fan differently or let me find it with sensors-detect and pwmconfig/fancontrol:

 *Quote:*   

> /usr/sbin/pwmconfig: There are no pwm-capable sensor modules installed

 

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## NeddySeagoon

Manu311,

I guess I'm teaching my granny to suck eggs ...

This kernel option provides a kernel interface for these utilities.

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## mrbassie

Maybe worth trying 

```
Symbol: ACPI_TOSHIBA                                                                                                                            │  

  │ Type  : tristate                                                                                                                                                │  

  │ Prompt: Toshiba Laptop Extras                                                                                                                                   │  

  │   Location:                                                                                                                                                     │  

  │     -> Device Drivers                                                                                                                                           │  

  │       -> X86 Platform Specific Device Drivers (X86_PLATFORM_DEVICES [=y])                                                                                       │  

  │   Defined at drivers/platform/x86/Kconfig:663                                                                                                                   │  

  │   Depends on: X86 && X86_PLATFORM_DEVICES && ACPI && ACPI_WMI && BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE && INPUT && (SERIO_I8042 || SERIO_I8 │  

  │   Selects: LEDS_CLASS && NEW_LEDS && INPUT_POLLDEV && INPUT_SPARSEKMAP 
```

as well if you haven't already.

EDIT: It's conceivable you could run your bios upgrade software in wine if you can get it to compile before your laptop overheats.

The only other thing I can think of to suggest would be that if you have any old disks laying around, buy a cheap usb enclosure, download win10 and install it to the external drive.

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## Manu311

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> Manu311,
> 
> I guess I'm teaching my granny to suck eggs ...
> 
> This kernel option provides a kernel interface for these utilities.

 

Sadly I'm using 64bit and always have been.

CONFIG_TOSHIBA depends on CONFIG_X86_32 which depends on !CONFIG_64BIT

If you can tell me how I can make it work anyways: Go ahead

But I might try a 32-bit-livecd to see if it's helping.

 *mrbassie wrote:*   

> Maybe worth trying 
> 
> ```
> Symbol: ACPI_TOSHIBA                                                                                                                            │  
> 
> ...

 

I tried that, sadly it didn't help.

I really don't want to brick my notebook by letting wine handle my bios  :Wink: . The win10 route would probably work, but I wouldn't want to try as long as I'm not convinced that a bios update would help.

//EDIT:

I gotta change that "doesn't add anything useful" to: It adds cooling_method under /sys/ and accepts "Max performance" and "Battery Optimized" - but Performance seems to be the default or at least it doesn't really reduce temperature (by much).

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## Telemin

Did you try looking to see what acpitool is able to control for you?  I just used it to query something on one of my own machines and that reminded me that it supports a bunch of asus and toshiba specific ACPI methods for fans, leds etc.  Could be worth a look perhaps?

-Telemin-

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## Manu311

I don't really know anything about acpitool, however -T (toshiba) shows:

 *Quote:*   

>  Could not open file : /proc/acpi/toshiba/lcd
> 
>  function Do_LCD_Info : make sure your kernel has Toshiba ACPI support enabled.
> 
>  Could not open file : /proc/acpi/toshiba/video
> ...

 

According to lsmod the module toshiba_acpi is loaded however.

The only "real" informations I could get out of acpitool were battery, cpu-stats and this:

 *Quote:*   

>   Thermal info   : <not available>

 

If I miss something, could you point me at the flags that would show something useful?

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## Telemin

I'm afraid that was a last "Hail Mary" idea, sorry.  I don't know any more detail about acpi fan control as I have never had a machine that has been done that way.

The only thing I have left to ask is: are you sure that the fan is working properly?  It could be a physical issue with the fan that is preventing it spinning up fully.  Again, this is pure speculation and nothing more.

I guess options beyond this involve getting in touch with developers who are known to work on these things - acpitools devs, acpi-toshiba contributors etc. and see if they are able to help.

-Telemin-

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## Manu311

The problem was there since I buyed the notebook (new) 4 years ago. The fan is spinning at a rather high speed for a few seconds, but then the temperature fell low enough and it turns off again. Temperature rises again, etc.

However I think the fan is using a different sensor, since I can't find any real correlation between the three sensors I can read ("Package id 0", "Core 0", "Core 1"). Sometimes the fan spins rather fast at 75°C, sometimes it's not and hitting the 85°C that causes an emergency shutdown.

I guess I'll search for a second hard disk where I can install a Windows XP or something to update the bios the "save"-way and hope for some improvements.

Thanks for your ideas anyways - if anyone still has some: go ahead, I'll try it.

I'll post if something changed, so as long as I don't do that: the issue is still there.

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