Smoother fan control

[TheTumultuousUnicornOfDarkness]

Hello,

I own a Ryzen 5 3600X with schedutil CPU governor, but CPU temperature does spikes like every 5-7 seconds at idle.
This is a bit annoying because it generates random noise at idle.

Here is a diagram with 250 values:

Archive with SVG digram and CSV file: values.tar.gz
afancontrol configuration file: afancontrol.txt

Smoother fan control is welcome to correct this problem: I think afancontrol could use the mean of last umpteenth values instead of the current value.

[KostyaEsmukov]

Yep, I've seen this kind of behaviour on Ryzen 3900X as well. These chips can change their temperatures quite rapidly.

And I totally agree that having a way to define smoothing filters would be very useful. I think they should probably be put on the temperature sensors side rather than on the PWM fans side.

Another problem I have witnessed is that some temperature sensors (notably SSD/HDD) might report inadequately large individual measurements (i.e. over 100℃). A moving mean filter would be affected by these erroneous spikes, but a moving median would not. I even had a local branch with a rough implementation of that, but unfortunately I never got to actually complete it.

Eventually I would love to have these filters implemented, but for the moment I don't have time to do that myself. Let me know if you would like to work on that yourself, so I could share what I have in that branch which could be a starting point.

[TheTumultuousUnicornOfDarkness]

You are right, median will be more adequate than mean.

Eventually I would love to have these filters implemented, but for the moment I don't have time to do that myself. Let me know if you would like to work on that yourself, so I could share what I have in that branch which could be a starting point.

I cannot guarantee that I will have free time to work on this, but if you don't mind, share your work in progress on a separate branch and I will take a look.

ATM, I set the CPU governor to powersave for low power tasks as a workaround.

[KostyaEsmukov]

I have just pushed that branch: https://github.com/KostyaEsmukov/afancontrol/tree/f/filters

IIRC it worked fine, but I just trashed the faulty HDD/SSD device instead of finishing that branch. :)

[KostyaEsmukov]

I have just released afancontrol==2.2.0 which contains an initial support for filters: b06324c.

Example configuration:

[filter: moving_quantile_80]
type = moving_quantile
quantile = 0.8
window_size = 10

[temp:cpu]
...
filter = moving_quantile_80

quantile = 0.8 would make it prefer higher temperatures (i.e. it would always take the 80-th percentile temperature in the window of last 10 observations). If the goal is to make fans more quiet at the cost of slower reaction, then a lower quantile can be used, such as quantile = 0.3.

[KostyaEsmukov]

This graph shows how the aforementioned moving_quantile_80 filter affects the temperature measurements on Ryzen 3900X:

[TheTumultuousUnicornOfDarkness]

(Sorry for the late response)

Wow, awesome, that is better now. Thank you very much!