On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 6:41 PM, John R Pierce <pie...@hogranch.com> wrote: > Joseph L. Casale wrote: <snip> >> Yeah, turn on a machine w/o a heatsink :) In a couple of seconds it will >> get so hot that you can't touch it and the internal safety threshold on the >> proc will shut it down. I suspect the mobo might have a bios that can control >> the fan speed and the hysteresis or whatever technique it uses to control >> reaction time. My Asus has this IIRC... > > the newest Intel chipsets actually have all this built into the ICH9R or > whatever, managed by microcode running in the northbridge as a > management coprocessor. I forget what Intel 4-letter-acronym this is > under. However, this does NOT play well with the legacy LM style way > of doing things from the host, and I suspect many of the third party > boards continue to use LM or similar sensor chips on the i2c bus, old > school, rather than relying on this chipset built-in fan control > stuff. I have an Intel branded G33 board (running Windows XP) and > none of the usual fan control programs like SpeedFan have a clue how to > talk to this stuff. I'll guess without any specific knowlege that > Linux lm_sensors will have similar problems. > > Intel calls this coprocessor on the Northbridge the Management Engine > (ME) and Host Embedded Controller Interface (HECI), and system wide its > branded Intel "Quiet System Technology" (QST), which includes the MCH w/ > ME, the ME Firmware, and the associated BIOS support. Apparently once > configured by the BIOS, this runs without host OS intervention, > including monitoring the CPU, northbridge and southbridge thermal > sensors, cpu and chassis fan tach sensors and PWM for the respective fans.
The HW people are way ahead of the SW people? A good reason not to use the latest motherboards, with this technology, in production servers, at this time? _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos