[CentOS] Fan speed control on Supermicro X8DAL board with CentOS

Sun Feb 6 07:00:16 UTC 2011
Chuck Munro <chuckm at seafoam.net>

Hello folks,

I'm having a difficult time trying to figure out why the CPU cooling 
fans run at full speed on my Supermicro X8DAL-3 motherboard.  There 
doesn't seem to be any variable speed (the fans are PWM compatible) ... 
they either idle at almost nothing, or suddenly burst into a 
high-pitched scream that gets my ears bleeding after a few seconds. 
Once they jump to warp-10, they remain there.

The "Super-I/O" chip on this board is a Winbond W83627DHG which does the 
temperature and voltage monitoring.

Is anyone aware of which driver or kernel module I need for that chip in 
order to get control of the fans?  The Supermicro web site and the 
board's manual aren't any help.  Fresh installs of CentOS-5.5 and RHEL-6 
don't exert any control by default.  Installing the lm_sensors package 
and probing with the 'sensors' command didn't help either.

Slowly going deaf .......

Chuck