The minimalist fan control program
Thinkfan is a simple, lightweight fan control program.
There's only very basic sanity checking on the configuration (semantic plausibility). You can set the temperature limits as insane as you like.
Any change to fan behaviour that results in higher temperatures in some parts of the system will shorten your system's lifetime and/or cause weird hardware bugs that'll make you pull out your hair.
No warranties whatsoever
If this program steals your car, kills your horse, smokes your dope or pees on your carpet... too bad, you're on your own.
To compile thinkfan, you will need to have the following things installed:
E.g. on a debian-based system that usually boils down to:
sudo apt install -y cmake-curses-gui build-essential cmake g++ libyaml-cpp-dev pkgconfig libsensors-dev
on EL/Fedora based system, usually :
sudo dnf install -y cmake g++ pkgconfig yaml-cpp-devel lm_sensors-devel
In the thinkfan main directory, do
mkdir build && cd build
Then configure your build, either interactively:
ccmake ..
Or set your build options from the command line. E.g. to configure a build with full debugging support:
cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Debug ..
CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING
can also be Release
, which produces a fully
optimized binary, or RelWithDebInfo
, which is also optimized but can
still be debugged with gdb.
Other options are:
USE_NVML:BOOL
(default: ON
)
Allows thinkfan to read GPU temperatures from the proprietary nVidia
driver. The interface library is loaded dynamically, so it does not
need to be installed when compiling.
USE_ATASMART:BOOL
(default: OFF
)
Enable libatasmart to read temperatures directly from hard disks. Use
this only when you really need it, since libatasmart is unreasonably
CPU-intensive.
USE_LM_SENSORS:BOOL
(default: ON
)
Use LM sensors to read temperatures directly from Linux drivers.
The libsensors
library needs to be installed for this feature, probably
with required headers and development files (e.g., libsensors-dev
).
USE_YAML:BOOL
(default: ON
)
Support config file in the new, more flexible YAML format. The old
config format will be deprecated after the thinkfan 1.0 release. New
features will be supported in YAML configs only. See
examples/thinkfan.conf.yaml. Requires libyaml-cpp.
To compile simply run:
make
If you did not change CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
, thinkfan will be installed
under /usr/local
by doing:
sudo make install
CMake will detect whether you use OpenRC or systemd and install some
appropriate service files. With systemd, you can edit the commandline
arguments of the thinkfan service with systemctl edit thinkfan
.
With OpenRC, we install only a plain initscript (edit /etc/init.d/thinkfan
to change options).
thinkfan -h
thinkfan(1)
, thinkfan.conf(5)