Karlson is mining rig GPU temperature/fan controller

This is a piece of logic that can help you to sustain optimal balance between GPUs temperature and fan speed. This is linux only service, compatible with AMD and nVidia GPUs.

Karlson main goal is to operate at minimum fan speed to extend its lifetime.

Intended for use in data centers on servers without any GUI.

How it works

Basically service work based on next parameters:

optimal temparature
hot temperature
critical temperature
optimal fan speed

Work logic is next:

when GPU temperature is between optimal and hot, fan speed will be at optimal level
if temperature drops below optimal, then fan speed will be reduced to some equilibrium level, when GPU temperature is not rising up
if temperature rise above hot, fan speed will increase to hold temperature at hot level
temperatures above critical force fan to use 100% speed.

As you can see now, fan speed/temperature relation in karlson is more complicated than just simple linear dependency.

Building from sources

It should be very easy for you:

Install Rust curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
Clone this repo to your local machine
Build debug binary cargo build --release
Build release cargo build --release

Now you will be able to find binaries at target/debug/karlson or target/release/karlson

You can also build and run service using cargo run -- -h

Configuration

Karlson read settings from *.toml configuration file. You must set valid path to *.toml config in CLI arguments.

For more information look into example configuration karlson.toml in this repo.

The main thing you should notice about configuration is that for AMD GPU it use device index as in /sys/class/hwmon directory (hwmon42 index is 42), nVidia GPU indexes are the same as in output of nvidia-smi.

Running as a service

Karlson can be simply configured as a systemd service.

AMD only configuration

Just create file /etc/systemd/system/karlson.service With next content

[Unit]
Description=Karlson

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/path/to/bin/karlson -d /path/to/your/configuration/karlson.toml
User=root
Group=root
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Next you should enable this service like systemctl enable karlson.service

Now you can start/stop it via systemctl

nVidia/AMD configuration

Support for nVidia is ugly because it requires to have X server and it also requires to run karlson service with valid X display. Also it have to work without any GUI.

To make it work you should install X server on your system. Next you have to create separate (virtual) display for working with karlson. Add service config /etc/systemd/system/X.service

Description=Virtual X Display

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/X :99
User=some_non_root_user
Group=some_non_root_users
Restart=always
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

This will create X display with id value :99

Karlson config /etc/systemd/system/karlson.service should now look like this

[Unit]
Description=Karlson
BindsTo=X.service

[Service]
Environment=DISPLAY=:99
Type=simple
ExecStart=/path/to/bin/karlson -d  /path/to/your/configuration/karlson.toml
User=root
Group=root
Restart=always
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

We just add dependency from X service and set up DISPLAY environment value.

Now you can enable this services and manage them via systemctl

systemctl enable X.service
systemctl enable karlson.service

Read systemd logs

After you have configured service as described above, you can read karlson logs using journalctl -fu karlson

License

This software is free for personal use only. More details can be found in LICENSE.txt file.

ktsol/karlson