Manage temperatures & fans on Linux

If you are here, you may had problems to manage your fans speed or check your temps on Linux.

Fortunately there are some tools to help you with that, one of the most known is lm-sensors, it provide a tool for GNU/Linux systems to monitor and handle temperatures, tensions, fan speed & moisture levels.

The current supported sensors are :

• ISA hardware monitoring chips.
• I2C/SMBus hardware monitoring chips.
• SPI hardware monitoring chips.
• Hardware monitoring features integrated in Super-I/O chips.
• Hardware monitoring features integrated in south bridges.
• Thermal sensors integrated in CPU.
• Thermal sensors integrated in memory modules.

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Installation & detection

Proceed to the installation of « lm-sensors ».

sudo apt install lm-sensors

Then you can run the sensor detection tool.

sudo sensors-detect

The output should look like this, it can vary depending of your hardware.

sensors-detect version 3.6.0# System: ***# Board: ***# Kernel: ***# Processor: ***This program will help you determine which kernel modules you needto load to use lm_sensors most effectively. It is generally safeand recommended to accept the default answers to all questions,unless you know what you're doing.Some south bridges, CPUs or memory controllers contain embedded sensors.Do you want to scan for them? This is totally safe. (YES/no): Module cpuid loaded successfully.Silicon Integrated Systems SIS5595...                       NoVIA VT82C686 Integrated Sensors...                          NoVIA VT8231 Integrated Sensors...                            NoAMD K8 thermal sensors...                                   NoAMD Family 10h thermal sensors...                           NoAMD Family 11h thermal sensors...                           NoAMD Family 12h and 14h thermal sensors...                   NoAMD Family 15h thermal sensors...                           NoAMD Family 16h thermal sensors...                           NoAMD Family 17h thermal sensors...                           Success!    (driver `k10temp')AMD Family 15h power sensors...                             NoAMD Family 16h power sensors...                             NoHygon Family 18h thermal sensors...                         NoIntel digital thermal sensor...                             NoIntel AMB FB-DIMM thermal sensor...                         NoIntel 5500/5520/X58 thermal sensor...                       NoVIA C7 thermal sensor...                                    NoVIA Nano thermal sensor...                                  No

Here the lm-sensors software is trying to guess what kind of CPU you have to find which sensors are present, some prompts will then appears, just go for the recommended values and reboot.

If you have a graphics card, your GPU sensors should also be recognized.

To check every detected sensors, just type the following command.

sensors

If you are running on a laptop, this install can provide more information to your fan controllers and in some case, resolve fan speed & temperatures issues.

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GUI for Temperature & Fan speed visualisation

You can use psensor to get a quick visualisation of your temps and fan speed after executing the lm-sensors tool

sudo apt-get install psensor