Fan speed changes are too jerky and noisy - will wear fan too soon

[samodadela]

After some more testing I decide to disable tuxedo-control-center (systemctl disable tccd). Control center version: 1.0.8-1.1. System: Tuxedo Aura 15 Gen1

Why: I noticed that the fan control was turning on-off and changing it’s speed too often - which was resulting in clicks coming from the fan. In one case it also did a not inspiring grinding sound. I reckon that changing the fan speed too often will wear the fan too soon.

To describe it in more detail:

with mode Balanced and computer idle: at start the fan is at 0%… after some light load cpu temp goes up and fan starts at 15% which results in a click (on the Aura it's like a 0.5s grind)… after 5 seconds or so cpu is cool again and fan stops… 10 seconds later it again starts click…
with mode Freezy: fan start at around 10-15% (this mode I suspect want to keep the cpu temperature freezy)… after 1-2 seconds it increases the speed slightly which results in a click (because fan accelerates)… after 1-2 second it changes speed again.

There is no way I found to set some kind of hysteresis without coding…

See also post: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/update-tuxedo-packages-for-latest-hardware-aura-15-gen1/43236/11

I think this could be fixed by adding this logic: If the fan speed was changed very recently and the required change is small - don't change the speed. However if the change is big (e.g. meaning we need too cool ASAP) do the change anyway.

Example:
Currently (shows fan speeds, with time, each second; the 'very recently' constant is 5 seconds):
old: 10 11 10 11 10 11 10 20
new: 10 10 10 10 10 11 11 20 (5 seconds there was no change... then it went to 11, the at 20 because the change was big)

[samodadela]

Another option that would make control center useful until this is fixed would be to be able to disable fan control and only use CC for limiting the cpu speed. The default (BIOS?) fan control is much more smooth than CC's fan control.

Is there a way to control the CPU speed from the command line?

[Matombo]

An option to disable the fan control in tcc is already on the internal todo list for some time and just yesterday I started to work on this bullet point. No ETA given whatsoever however, as it requires some changes on tccd and is not just a checkbox.

[samodadela]

@Matombo Great news.

Is there a way to control tccd via command line? Or to ask differently how does TCC interact with tccd? While TCC looks nice, I'd rather have a way to control tccd via command line. For example I often want to switch the CPU to a lower speed when videoconferencing (to make the fans silent) and could map this function to a keyboard shortcut.

[Matombo]

tcc writes config files that tccd reads.

Like this, profiles stay active even when tcc gets closed.

The config files are stored in /etc/tcc/ and are in json format. You can edit them directly and tccd will recognize the changes. Note however that these config files are not a stable api and might change on any update. Also the "governor" setting, while being in the config file is currently unused by both tcc as well as tccd. tccd just sets a default govenor.

tccd also exposes some information to the d-bus to be displayed by tcc, for example the current actual clockspeed of the cpu.

[Apflkuacha]

The clicks are also mentioned in this PullRequest The minimal fanspeed should be higher on some devices.

But in general such a filter as you described would be perfect that the fanspeed doesn't change that often.

[brunoais]

Not complete but you can also see this:
https://github.com/brunoais/tuxedo-control-center-profile-changer/tree/master
A very small program I made to change tcc profiles without the need to type the password.

[tuxedoherbert]

There were significant updates to the whole fan-control stuff. Please update to version 1.1.0.

TCC has also a quick profile switcher at the tray icon, feel free to check it out :)