Table of Contents

Fancontrol

Fancontrol is a utility to control the fan speed. If you don't have a system in place that manages CPU (and other) fan speeds, e.g. native BIOS/UEFI fan control or a (Open)BMC solution, fancontrol can bring various benefits to your system, such as quieter working system and power saving by reducing fan speeds on low CPU load.

Install and configure

sudo apt install 'lm-sensors fancontrol' && sudo sensors-detect && sudo -e '/etc/fancontrol' && sudo systemctl enable 'fancontrol'  

Notes regarding changing hwmon paths

hwmon paths can change after rebooting a system. This results in different paths in /etc/fancontrol which renders the current setup useless and requires to manually reset /etc/fancontrol or running pwmconfig again on each reboot.

Thus it's recommended to create a .conf file in /etc/modprobe.d/ to set sensor module load order for reboot-stable fancontrol settings. After rebooting and fixing the paths in /etc/fancontrol or running pwmconfig.

For example on an ASUS KCMA-D8:

softdep fam15h_power pre: k10temp  
softdep k10temp pre: jc42  
softdep jc42 pre: w83795g  
softdep w83795g pre: radeon