Arch Linux

jaen

Member

Registered: 2010-12-24

Posts: 21

Asus U41SV ACPI not working well

I have an impression that ACPI in my laptop may not be working entirely right, since neither lm-sensors register any sensors other than CPU temperature nor I have any entry in /proc/acpi besides battery and ac-adapter, not even fans.
I also noticed when I left my laptop overnight downloading stuff over torrent that it was way too hot, the CPU had 60something degrees in the morning and HDD was quite hot too, though I don't remember the exact temperature. I don't think that a CPU should be this hot from just downloading torrents and I think that maybe while running Windows the manufacturer provided ACPI drivers do manage fan temperature and when powering down leave it as-is and since Linux doesn't seem to recognize fans it doesn't change the fan RPM according to CPU temperature which results in such high temperatures building up over time even when processor is mostly idling.
Is there any way to have fan control back? From what I read the /proc/acpi/fans should be reported right most of the time and that clearly is not the case here.
Or maybe modern laptops don't give fan control to OS and do it on ther own? In which case it kinda sucks as it clearly can't manage to keep the temperature low in a non-demanding scenario, but oh well.

Also when I try to modprobe asus_laptop it doesn't seem to recognize my hardware and while asus_nb_wmi does seem to load it is reported as not used by anything:

asus_nb_wmi             1537  0 
asus_wmi               13644  1 asus_nb_wmi
sparse_keymap           3088  1 asus_wmi
pci_hotplug            25672  1 asus_wmi
rfkill                 15402  3 asus_wmi,bluetooth,cfg80211
wmi                     8347  2 asus_wmi,mxm_wmi

I also noticed that powertop reports processor, while spending most of the time in the lowest clock rating, also spends up to 10% in Turbo Mode or highest clock, even when just browsing webpages with chromium and listening to music with mpd.
Are such spikes normal with conservative cpufreq governor, or can/should this be somehow fixed?