Making fans more aggressive on Linux

Framework Laptop 13 Linux
1

Which Linux distro are you using? Ubuntu

Which release version?
24.04.3 LTS

Which kernel are you using?
Linux 6.14.0-32-generic #32~24.04.1-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue Sep 2 14:21:04 UTC 2 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Which BIOS version are you using?

3.16

Which Framework Laptop 13 model are you using? (AMD Ryzen™ AI 300 Series, AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series, Intel® Core™ Ultra Series 1, 13th Gen Intel® Core™ , 12th Gen Intel® Core™, 11th Gen Intel® Core™)

AMD 7840U

I’m wondering if there’s a way for me to make the fans more aggressive on Linux? Every now and then my laptop will get pretty hot (90+C) not doing a whole lot and the fans aren’t really running very hard to cool it down. The problem is that it seems to be thermally throttling (especially if it hits 100C) which reduces performance and responsiveness, but I wouldn’t have minded it running the fans harder earlier to avoid this. I see a lot of mentions of ectool on the internet but it feels like there’s not an official build of it and it’s not clear to me where to get the latest/best version (seeing multiple repos in different places, some of which are Framework-owned and some which aren’t). Would appreciate help with this. Thanks!

2

Yes, “ectool thermalset”, see AMD FW13 fan behaviour and ramp-up times - #13 by pierce (I have a custom startup script set this at boot)

Hmm, yeah … so, the framework “embedded controller” is open-source and based on Google Chromebooks (I think?) embedded-controller code, so that “ectool” was originally written for Chromebooks (?). The original fork was by @DHowett - see Exploring the Embedded Controller

That’s one of those epic huge threads; I think the latest place to get his version is at GitHub - DHowett/ectool: ectool, isolated from the ChromeOS code, and with some Framework-specific support (I just build it from source, it has very minimal dependencies) or you can try downloading a linux binary from Artifacts · Dustin L. Howett / ectool · GitLab