i8kutils is a collection of utilities for controlling the fans on some Dell laptops. The utilities are entirely built upon the dell-smm-hwmon kernel module.

The i8kutils package includes the following utilities:

• i8kctl, a command-line utility for interfacing with the kernel module.
• i8kmon, a temperature monitor with fan control capability.

Since 2011 (kernel version 3.0), the kernel module exports temperature and fan data over the standard linux hwmon interface. If you are running a recent enough kernel, you might want to take a look at the lm-sensors project.

This software is released under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence version 2 or later:

Copyright (C) 2001-2009 Massimo Dal Zotto [email protected]

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

The full documentation of the dell_smm_hwmon kernel module can be found here.

The following module parameters are worth mentioning:

• ignore_dmi=1

  • forces the driver to load on unknown hardware

• force=1

  • forces the driver to load on unsupported/buggy hardware
  • might cause problems since it also disables all blacklists for buggy hardware, use only when ignore_dmi=1 is not enough

• fan_mult=

  • overrides the fan speed multiplicator

• fan_max=

  • overrides the maximum fan state

You can specify the module parameters when loading the module or as kernel parameter when booting the kernel if the driver is builtin.

To have the module loaded automatically at boot you must manually add the line "dell-smm-hwmon" into the file /etc/modules or use the modconf utility. For example:

$ cat /etc/modules
# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.
dell-smm-hwmon

Any module parameters must be specified in /etc/modprobe.d/dell-smm-hwmon.conf. To force dell-smm-hwmon to load on unknown/unsupported hardware, it should contain the following line:

options dell-smm-hwmon force=1

The i8kctl utility provides a command-line interface to the dell-smm-hwmon kernel driver. It only supports a subset of the available sensors, use the sensors program to retrieve all sensor data.

In order to modify fan speeds, the utility requires root privileges.

The i8mon utility provides a daemon for fan control based on the current temperature. It can be configured by editing /etc/i8kmon.conf and is targeted towards machines which do not provide adequate BIOS fan control.

The daemon requires root privileges.

Python >= 3.9 and the dbus-next package is required for the utilities to work.

python3 -m pip install i8kutils

Contributors are listed here, in alphabetical order.

• Pablo Bianucci [email protected]

  • support for /proc/acpi

• David Bustos [email protected]

  • patches for generating keyboard events

• Jonathan Buzzard [email protected]

  • basic information on the SMM BIOS and the Toshiba SMM driver
  • Asm code for calling the SMM BIOS on the I8K. Without his help this work wouldn't have been possible.

• Karl E. Jørgensen [email protected]

  • init script for i8kmon daemon

• Stephane Jourdois [email protected]

  • patches for correctly interpreting buttons status in the i8k driver

• Marcel J.E. Mol [email protected]

  • patches for the --repeat option in the i8kbuttons (obsolete on Abr 30, 2014) util

• Gianni Tedesco [email protected]

  • patch to restrict fan contol to SYS_ADMIN capability

• David Woodhouse [email protected]

  • suggestions on how to avoid the zombies in i8kbuttons (obsolete on Abr 30, 2014)

• Vitor Augusto [email protected]

  • fixes for the freeze bug at i8kmon, general update and bug fixes

and many others who tested the driver on their hardware and sent reports and patches.

No credits to DELL Computer who has always refused to provide documentation regarding the low level BIOS interface used by the kernel module.

Massimo Dal Zotto [email protected]