Fan running non-stop w/Ubuntu 14.04

May 9, 2018 9:49 AM

I have an older Toshiba Portege laptop running Ubuntu 14.04, and starting about 6 months ago, the fan began to run constantly, at full speed, whenever it's turned on. I've tried to troubleshoot to no avail, so I'm looking for some help from folks with more Linux background than me that can ID the problem.
posted by ryanshepard to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

first, start a terminal (try the shortcut Control-Alt-T - or tap the windows key to bring up the Dash, and type "terminal")

then in the terminal, type "top" and hit return - it shows you a list of current resource-consuming processes that are running on your laptop - it refreshes every couple of seconds

ignore the first half-dozen or so lines - look in the listing in the lower part of the screen for a process that's showing consistently at the top of the list - you can get the name of that process in the COMMAND column on the right hand side

then - either tell us here what it is, or use your favourite search engine with the process name as a search key - should give you some clues about why it's always on CPU (hence making your machine run hot, hence the fan is always blowing)
posted by rd45 at 10:10 AM on May 9, 2018

If it's not rd45's process issue (the tracker indexing process is a good one for hoovering up all CPU: if it is, there's a fix) then you need to search for exactly your model number and "fan linux". It's likely a kernel module that's missing, and the toshset package may fix it.

If you're running an older machine, using the Lubuntu desktop will free up many RAM issues. Unity started to get really memory hungry under 14.04, and that's why it's gone as of 17.10
posted by scruss at 10:35 AM on May 9, 2018

Upgrading to the latest release might be sane too: At some point you're no longer going to be getting security updates & I think 14.04 fell off that treadmill some time back.
posted by pharm at 10:38 AM on May 9, 2018

Response by poster: ignore the first half-dozen or so lines - look in the listing in the lower part of the screen for a process that's showing consistently at the top of the list - you can get the name of that process in the COMMAND column on the right hand side

I may not be understanding what you're asking here, but all I see are an endlessly shifting list of processes, with various ones moving in position as the program runs.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:17 AM on May 9, 2018

pharm: "I think 14.04 fell off that treadmill some time back."

14.04 is a "Long Term Support" release that will receive support until April 2019.
posted by crazy with stars at 12:03 PM on May 9, 2018

The output from "top" will be a list of processes, you want to look at the CPU% column, it should default to sorted by cpu%, anything consistently over 20% could be causing the fan to go, there will be tons of processes below 1% that you can ignore.
posted by TheAdamist at 12:37 PM on May 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

If top isn't giving you an obvious culprit right away, try booting without loading Unity (or XDE or whatever you're using).

This is runlevel 3 if you're comfortable messing with your bootloader, but you can also just kill X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace - this should dump you into command line, and top should show far fewer processes running. (Alternatively, Command-Alt-F1 will dump you into a virtual terminal using fewer graphics without killing X).

If that gets no results, try booting a live version from a thumb drive and see if you have the same issue.

This may actually be a hardware problem; I've had a laptop intake fan fail before. Depending on your machine there are several possible fans that might be running (e.g. if you have a dedicated graphics card it may have a fan).
posted by aspersioncast at 12:57 PM on May 9, 2018

Aside from possible runaway processes, the fan running immediately and constantly could also be a heat sensor failure.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:34 PM on May 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

Instead of running "top" you can also run the System Monitor app. It's basically the same thing in a user-friendly GUI.
posted by number9dream at 2:07 PM on May 9, 2018

Some logic boards will ramp up the CPU fan to max if the OS doesn't communicate properly with the system controller, which could be a missing driver or kernel module as scruss says, or it could be that the BIOS/EFI controller is running in the wrong mode for the OS. If you haven't changed any BIOS/EFI settings then I'd lean towards a corrupted package or one that was disabled in an OS update, but I suppose there's an outside chance that the system controller got reset to the wrong mode after a hard reset.

One maybe-easy thing to try would be to boot up a different OS, if you have that ability. If you have a dual boot setup, does the fan spin up like that in Windows? Does it happen if you boot from a current live CD (or USB) for whatever distro?
posted by fedward at 2:07 PM on May 9, 2018

Good advice above, but... do you have a cat? The air intake vents may just be jammed up with cat fur, reducing fan efficacy and keeping the laptop running consistently too hot. If so, you can carefully open the case and clean out the fur.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 2:20 PM on May 9, 2018