Does it make sense to create a centralized fan control module?

[Heyi Guo]

Thanks for your comments; that sounds reasonable.

Heyi

On 2021/6/17 上午12:26, Ed Tanous wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 6:19 PM Heyi Guo <guoheyi at linux.alibaba.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Right now fan related data like tacho and PWM is fetched in
>> dbus-sensors, and published to d-bus as sensor data, while fan control
>> is made in another module like pid-control, which can fetch data and set
>> value via d-bus.
>>
>> In some common sense, we may think about putting all fan related work
>> into one single module (which may be based on pid-control), i.e. it can
>> read tacho and PWM from hardware directly, calculate the required PWM by
>> some algorithm like PID, and then write to PWM hardware directly; the
>> data will also be published to d-bus for other modules to consume, like
>> fansensor from dbus-sensors.
>>
> To some extent, this design revolves around flexibility.  Fans aren't
> necessarily tacho devices, and sensors aren't necessarily hwmon devices, so
> dbus is used as an abstraction to be able to make them all look the same.
> For example, an NCSI NIC might have both a temperature and a fan that
> phosphor-pid-control might want to control, but we don't want
> phosphor-pid-control to take a dependency on NCSI.  While we could put all
> code for all possible sensor types into one daemon, that opens us up to the
> possibility that crashes could take down all of fan and thermal control,
> including the failsafe behavior.  That would be an issue.
>
> It might be possible to handle these issues in a single daemon, but I
> haven't really seen a design that covered all the cases;  Most
> implementations tend to take the simple approach (hwmon sensor + tacho
> device) and ignore the more complex setups.
>
>
>> Does it make sense to do that? Or is there any reason for the current
>> design?
>>
>> I'm new to OpenBMC and some of my understanding may be totally wrong.
>>
>> Looking forward to your expert advice.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Heyi
>>
>>