Serge Hallyn: Temperature indicator

I have a sony vaio f11 laptop. It’s pretty quick for a laptop, but it also runs pretty hot. (Sony has a bios update that supposedly cools it down a bit – by some reports at the expense of performance – but it only installs under windows, which I’ve no longer got.) Two or three times, during the dog days of summer, it has shut itself down due to heat.

Under /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone*, you can get some information about this. In particular, /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone1/trip_point_1_temp appears to be where the bios decides to work harder to cool down, while trip_point_0_temp is where it shuts down. The former is 94 (degrees Celsius, presumably) while the latter is 98. Unfortunately these are read-only and can’t be changed.

So I decided I should keep closer watch over the actual temperatures (to what end? dunno). My two main window managers are wmii and Unity – I use the two about equally. One great thing about wmii is that the status bar is filled in with a script, so adding the temperatures was trivial. My ‘Action status’ line simply became

        while true
        do
                if [ $((count % 2)) -eq 0 ]; then
                        t0=$(cat /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp)
                        t1=$(cat /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone1/temp)
                        t0=$((t0/1000))
                        t1=$((t1/1000))
                fi
                status $t0 $t1 | wmiir write /rbar/status
                count=$((count+1))
                sleep 1
        done

where the function ‘status’ adds some other info like uptime and battery state.

For Unity, I of course wanted a nicely integrated application indicator. So I spent a few minutes on the following python program, which I’m now using. You can find it packaged at ppa:serge-hallyn/indicators.

#!/usr/bin/python

#
# This program creates an indicator showing the current temp for each
# cpu on a sony vaio F11.
#
# Copyright 2009-2011 Canonical Ltd.
#
# Authors: Neil Jagdish Patel
#          Jono Bacon
#          Serge Hallyn
# Used
# http://bradmont.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/maildir-indicator.py_.txt
# as an example.
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it
# under the terms of either or both of the following licenses:
#
# 1) the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3, as published by the
# Free Software Foundation; and/or
# 2) the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1, as published by
# the Free Software Foundation.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
# WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranties of
# MERCHANTABILITY, SATISFACTORY QUALITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
# PURPOSE.  See the applicable version of the GNU Lesser General Public
# License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of both the GNU Lesser General Public
# License version 3 and version 2.1 along with this program.  If not, see
#
#

import gobject
import gtk
import appindicator
import os
import commands

CHECK_FREQUENCY = 2 # seconds
BAT_DIR="/sys/devices/virtual/thermal/"
BAT_FILE="temp"

def quit(widget, data=None):
  gtk.main_quit()

def read_file(i, dir):
  filename = BAT_DIR + dir + '/' + BAT_FILE
  f=open(filename, 'r')
  val=f.read()
  f.close()
  v = int(val)
  return "CPU%d: %dC" % (i, v/1000)

def update_temps(ind):
  tempstr = ''
  i = 0
  for d in os.listdir(BAT_DIR):
    if d[0:12] == "thermal_zone":
      if i > 0:
        tempstr += '|'
      tempstr += read_file(i, d)
      i += 1
  ind.set_label(tempstr)
  return True

if __name__ == "__main__":
  ind = appindicator.Indicator ("CPUTemp",
                              "ubuntu-logo",
                              appindicator.CATEGORY_SYSTEM_SERVICES)
  ind.set_status (appindicator.STATUS_ACTIVE)
  update_temps(ind)

  ind.set_icon("ubuntu-logo")

  menu = gtk.Menu()
  image = gtk.ImageMenuItem(gtk.STOCK_QUIT)
  image.connect("activate", quit)
  image.show()
  menu.append(image)

  ind.set_menu(menu)

  gtk.timeout_add(CHECK_FREQUENCY * 1000, update_temps, ind)

  gtk.main()

Now, when I’m watching a movie on Amazon Prime, I can watch the temperature go to about 80. If compiling while running a VM, I can watch it jump up to perhaps 95 and (before a bead of sweat can start down my forehead) back down into the 80s.