Hey everyone,
Probably a long shot, but does has anyone managed to get fan control working with a Macbook pro running Arch? I have a MacBook Pro 13" mid-2009 (MacBook Pro 5.5). Everything is working with Arch except the fan control. I had it working for a few minutes, then put the machine to sleep and it stopped upon waking it again. The two programs I know of are mbpfan and macfanctld I haven't been able to get either working. Any suggestions?
What about pwmconfig for configs + the fancontrol daemon? Should work on all systems unless there's weirdness in apple
I ran it after installing lm_sensors. It didn't find any PWM devices. I did find out what I needed to do to set the fans manually. At least I think I figured it out.
/sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768 is a directory that has a bunch of files in it that can be set to RPM values. They also have labels for other sensors that can be read. I'll probably write my own program to manage them. I found a couple of other ones but I couldn't get them to work. Now I know what is involved a bit better I may try them again. I think mbpfan was one of them.
Well you have the hardware infront of you so you have the control, I've only used it on 'regular' laptops, never ran any fan control on a Mac.
Damn now I want to buy one just for the sake to check how it works....
This is the only laptop I've had where fan control was an issue. I have a Lenovo Ideapad Y500, Sony Vaio from 2007 or 2008, and an old Acer laptop from 2005. All of those work well along with my desktop running a 4770K and Asus motherboard. Only the mac has issues under linux with fan control. I also had some issues getting wifi to work. That was mostly me not knowing what I needed for the Broadcom BCM4322 (hint, you need broadcom_wl from the AUR). I'm going to maybe tinker with the source code of mbpfan and see if there are any improvements to be made.
I found some blog posts that seem to be from the creator.
Original 2010 post
Updated 2011 post
With those issues solved, running Linux on a Mac isn't that bad of an experience. If I were to buy a new laptop I would still get a business grade Dell or Lenovo machine (Latitude or Thinkpad). I should also mention that I'm not even going to think about using the Nvidia proprietary drivers on this thing (uses a discrete 9400m). I just need it for RDP and web browsing. Touchpad drivers could also be better.
Sounds like fun times, altho maybe not so user-friendly... well you can either blame Apple or Linux, I guess that's what you get when you combine two opposites together; a walled garden and one open playing field.
I still want to get a Macbook to tinker with tho
Expensive toy to tinker with IMO. To each their own I guess :P
When putting my computer to sleep I have to restart the fancontrol service on wake from sleep for my profile to apply. Not sure why though. You said you had it working for a few minutes before sleep correct?
# systemctl restart fancontrolI had it working before I put it to sleep but I think that might have been because of me playing with it manually while having a program running that was supposed to manage it. Not really sure what happened. I'm going to see if I can write a small she'll script to handle reading the temperatures and setting a fan speed based on those temperatures using the manual control in the system folders mentioned above.