# strange fan behaviour - HP 8710p [Solved by bios downgrade]

## Khumarahn

Hello, everybody.

I'm quite new to gentoo and linux in general, so I googled a lot before posting this message.

I am a bit annoyed with fan on my laptop. It just won't turn off after it was turned on. Say, I turn on my machine, and it is dead silent. When I emerge something, fan turns on, but after emerge is complete and system is cooled enough it just won't stop.

But if I reboot computer, it is dead silent again. HP 8710p is known to be a good and silent laptop.

When I just realized that linux is cool, but didn't know anything about it, I installed mandriva, and there were no such issues, so probably something is wrong in my settings (also everything worked fine in vista and xp shipped with laptop).

Is there a way to find out what's going on, and may be fix it?

I will provide any information needed if someone will be interested.Last edited by Khumarahn on Fri Apr 17, 2009 7:30 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## alex.blackbit

since you report that using a different linux distro does bring different results your bios should not be the fault, but looking for a update should not be a mistake.

check if you have all necessary ACPI related options enabled in your kernel.

do you have acpid running?

check your system log for strange messages.

did you read the power management guide?

there are also related articed in the gentoo wiki (archive).

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## Khumarahn

Thank you for your reply. 

Yeap, I have acpi enabled in kernel, and acpid running, and I've read the power management guide.

Bios! It actually seems to be the reason. When I reorganized my /dev/sda, I installed windows first, and updated bios. Then I installed gentoo, and it really took me a lot of time to try all the combinations of settings to make my fan stop.

Now I downdated bios back to the previous version, and fan stops all right. HP programmers sucked with this bios update ((

By the way, does it help to select  

```

Processor type and features 

--> Subarchitecture Type 

-----> (X) Support for ScaleMP vSMP 

```

instead of "PC-compatible" for Core 2 Duo?

Does it work faster?

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## H0bb3z

I have this same laptop -- you should stick with the PC-Compatable setting here and just select the Core2/Xeon processor architecture in the kernel.  I'm not sure the ScaleMP vSMP apply, but I will look into it.  There is another section in the newer kernels that allow you to choose the Intel-specific processor scaling features...

I just acquired it, so I'm not done loading Gentoo on it, but probably will complete it in my spare time in the coming days...

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## Khumarahn

H0bb3z,

I use kernel with ScaleMP, because my processor seems to support it, as I've read on intel's web-site.

The only thing that tries to go wrong - nvidia-drivers (ScaleMP automatically selects "CONFIG_PARAVIRT=y", and when you try to emerge nvidia-drivers, it complains that paravirt is enabled, so after compiling the kernel I manually change 

"CONFIG_PARAVIRT=y" to 

"# CONFIG_PARAVIRT is not set"

in .config file, and emerge nvidia-drivers and everything works great.

I can share my .config for current stable gentoo-sources if someone will need it.

Best regards

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