Dell Optiplex temperature and fan control

Many of Dell Optiplex has no way of controlling fan speed in certain distros of Linux. This is a good enough work around. Fancontrol and/or i8kmon isn't a sure way of making sure that the fans aren't dead or at full blast. This is a crude solve.

How-to:

apt install i8kutils lm-sensors acpi

edit /etc/modules to contain:

coretemp
i8k
dell-smm-hwmon

edit /etc/modprobe.d/i8k.conf to contain:

options i8k force=1

reboot

Move tempcontrol.sh to /usr/local/bin/ and make sure it's executable (chmod +x) Move tempcontrol.service to /etc/systemd/system/

systemctl enable tempcontrol.service
systemctl start tempcontrol.service

Check status with systemctl status tempcontrol.service Check sensors to make sure that fan speed and temperature is showing correctly

Notes:

• The script finds the coretemp hwmon device by name, so there is no sensor path to edit.
• As a failsafe, both fans are set to max whenever the script exits (including systemctl stop), so the machine is never left without cooling.
• Thresholds and poll interval are variables at the top of tempcontrol.sh.

OPTIONAL: To also disable Dell's bios fan control use this

Credits: Tom Freudenberg, Ronny Svedman

For some reason you can trick Fancontrol to work on some versions of the Optiplex family

Keep /etc/modules as above

Don't use the i8k config but instead add this to /etc/modprobe.d/dell-smm-hwmon

options dell-smm-hwmon ignore_dmi=1

Run sensors-detect and then pwmconfig and if you're lucky you have a functioning fancontrol

Reboot