enabling SMBus controller on a Dell Optiplex GX1

[ticket]

Hi,

I have an old Dell Optiplex GX1 that I have been doing some overclocking on lately, and so it would be nice to be able to monitor the CPU's temperature. I am running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Drapper Drake. I have followed several guides for setting up lm-sensors with no success. I believe the reason for this is that Dell has the SMBus controller disable as I am prompted with this message at boot up:

[ 30.682455] piix4_smbus 0000:00:07.3: Found 0000:00:07.3 device

[ 30.682488] piix4_smbus 0000:00:07.3: Host SMBus controller not enabled!

I have tried doing

modprobe i2c-piix4 force=1 as well as modprobe i2c-piix4 force_addr=0x6000

I also tried adding the below modules to my /etc/modules

i2c-piix4 force=1 and i2c-piix4 force_addr=0x6000

and none of them have helped.

I believe I do have a chip that monitors temperature as Dell has utilities for windows that can read it from the chip. I believe the device in question is

0000:00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02)

which is supported by lm-sensors if I am correct.

I have attached the output from dmesg, lspci, sensors-detect, and lsmod, any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[ticket]

Dmesg output

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lspci output

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lsmod output

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sensors-detect output

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*bump*

[khali]

It seems that you already tried everything that was possible (modprobe i2c-piix4 force=1 and modprobe i2c-piix4 force_addr=0x6000). If it didn't work, there's nothing more we can do for you. I'm not too sure what happened though, as you say it "did not help" without saying if you at least saw different messages in the logs when using the force parameters (I don't see any of the "force" messages in your dmesg, which makes me wonder if your modprobe commands were correct.) Did "lspci -s 00:07.3 -xxx" show the forced I/O address at 0x90 after the second one?

You could still try looking for a BIOS update, who knows.

If there is a Windows tool provided by Dell and it can read the temperture, maybe it also provides technical details about where it gets it? The PIIX4 itself doesn't include thermal sensors, only an SMBus controller which can be used to talk to hardware monitoring chips.

There's also an unknown Super-I/O chip on your system, some of these chips include hardware monitoring features. So maybe the sensors are there and not behind the SMBus. That's a blind shot though...

I'm closing this ticket as it's very old now, and as you didn't put your e-mail address in Cc I doubt that you'll ever follow up. However, feel free to reopen it if you're still interested in solving the problem and you are ready to provide additional information as requested.

[ticket]

Replying to khali:

I'm closing this ticket as it's very old now, and as you didn't put your e-mail address in Cc I doubt that you'll ever follow up. However, feel free to reopen it if you're still interested in solving the problem and you are ready to provide additional information as requested.

although i'm not the original poster, i'd like to reopen this ticket, because on my dell optiplex gx620 running debian etch it doesn't work either

[khali]

Do you have something more descriptive than "it doesn't work"? Because frankly we're not going to be able to help you with just that. Your machine isn't even the same as the original report so whatever your problem is may be completely unrelated.

Please provide a full description of your problem and your e-mail address.

[ticket]

Replying to khali:

Do you have something more descriptive than "it doesn't work"? Because frankly we're not going to be able to help you with just that. Your machine isn't even the same as the original report so whatever your problem is may be completely unrelated. Please provide a full description of your problem and your e-mail address.

you might be right if you think it may be unrelated, but nevertheless, here are the outputs, my email would be <sensors-problem@…> lspci:  http://rafb.net/p/PCcWwz16.html lsmod:  http://rafb.net/p/IEqGKY69.html sensors-detect:  http://rafb.net/p/B2oHmg40.html

but it doesnt work, even if i force modprobing, sensors says that it can't find any sensor and i have to make sure that i loaded all the kernel drivers needed.

[juergh]

Your version of sensors is over 2 years old. Please use the latest version and rerun sensors.

[ticket]

Replying to juergh:

Your version of sensors is over 2 years old. Please use the latest version and rerun sensors.

i dont think that is possible, because my debian etch is running the 2.6.18 kernel and the latest version needs at least 2.6.25, so perhaps im going to upgrade to debian lenny

[juergh]

Uh sorry I meant to say to rerun the latest sensors-detect script. The script doesn't care about the kernel version. You can grab the script from here:  http://www.lm-sensors.org/browser/lm-sensors/trunk/prog/detect/sensors-detect

[ticket]

Replying to juergh:

Uh sorry I meant to say to rerun the latest sensors-detect script. The script doesn't care about the kernel version. You can grab the script from here:  http://www.lm-sensors.org/browser/lm-sensors/trunk/prog/detect/sensors-detect

looks like the new version can't find any sensor:  http://rafb.net/p/2bwn3w87.html

[juergh]

Replying to ticket:

Replying to juergh:

Uh sorry I meant to say to rerun the latest sensors-detect script. The script doesn't care about the kernel version. You can grab the script from here:  http://www.lm-sensors.org/browser/lm-sensors/trunk/prog/detect/sensors-detect

looks like the new version can't find any sensor:  http://rafb.net/p/2bwn3w87.html

That means your temp monitoring chips are most likely connected to the SMBus that is disabled. You already tried to force load i2c-piix4 and claim that didn't do anything (although that's a very broad statement, maybe you want to elaborate?) so there's not much left we can do.

[khali]

Posting links to  http://rafb.net/ which no longer work after a few days isn't exactly smart. How are we supposed to help? Please _attach_ the files here so that they stay available for future reference.

Anyway I seem to recall that the SMBus was NOT hidden and that it was driven by i2c-i801 not i2c-piix4. That's the kind of confusion you get when reopening a ticket for an unrelated problem :(

I think it's about time to close this bug and open a separate one for the new issue, with proper attachments.