OpenIndiana Distribution

I'm on a stationary system using AMD Phenom II X4 and a Radeon HD 5770. I wrote the following in the OpenIndiana mailing list:

When I boot into the OpenIndiana, the GPU fan slowly ramps up the speed up to max within a few minutes (think slow crescendo but with loud noise instead of music). When I boot into Windows, the fan does not behave that way. What I have found out is that the fan/temperature profile is in the BIOS of the graphics adapter but it needs to be activated by the driver of the operating system, probably a bit flag somewhere that needs to be flipped. Catalyst (CCC) for Linux should take care of this but this is OpenIndiana.

On my system it is the GPU fan that is the cuplrit and not the other fans. It took me a while to realize this. I have tried troubleshooting this before all the way back when I used OpenSolaris. I was suggested to use the command powertop to see if there is a process that takes up a lot of CPU. I gave up in the end because I was unable to determine which fan it was. Today I have the proper equipment to measure the rpms of the fan without the need for software and I have found out which fans that are regulated and which fans that are not.

The graphics card consumes about 30W from its auxiliary power connector so it is not under a heavy load that would motivate such a high fan speed. I think it is a factory default setting to let the fan rotate at high speed until a proper driver initializes it, so we are basically looking at the radeon driver and routines for that should be in there.

I could not find any ACPI related error messages with dmesg and I doubt that the GPU fan control can be modified through ACPI.