Reading the temperature using /sys rather than /proc (Shallow Thoughts)

Reading the temperature using /sys rather than /proc

I was curious whether Linux could read the CPU temperature on Dave's new Mac Mini. I normally read the temperature with something like this:

cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/ATF0/temperature

(the ATF0 part varies from machine to machine).

Though this doesn't work on all machines -- on my AMD desktop it always returns the same number, which, I'm told, means that the BIOS probably has some code that looks something like this:

if (OS == "Win95" || OS == "Win98") {
  return get_win9x_temp();
}
else if (OS == "WinNT" || OS == "WinXP" || OS == "Vista") {
  return get_nt_temp();
}
else {
  return 40;
}

Anyway, I wondered whether the Mac would have that problem (with different OS names, of course).

There wasn't anything in /proc/acpi/thermal_zone on the Mac, but /proc is deprecated and we're all supposed to be moving to /sys, right? But nobody writes about the new way to get the temperature from /sys; most people are still using the old /proc way.

Took some digging, but I found it:

cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp

It's in thousandths of a degree C now, rather than straight degrees C.

And on the Mini? Nope, it's not there either. If Dave needs the temperature he needs to stick to OS X, or else figure out lm_sensors.

Update: Matthew Garrett has an excellent blog article on the OS entries reported to ACPI. Apparently Linux since 2.6.29 has claimed to be "Microsoft Windows NT" to avoid just the sort of problem I mentioned. Though that leaves me confused about why my desktop machine always reports 40C. Thanks to JanC for pointing me to that article!

Tags: linux, acpi, kernel, tips
[ 21:54 Apr 08, 2009    More linux/kernel | permalink to this entry | ]