Dell Latitude - SMSC - Found unknown chip with ID 0x2803

[ticket]

Hello!

I've been playing a bit with lm-sensors. I tried detecting sensors and got this bit in the output:

Trying family `SMSC'... Yes Found unknown chip with ID 0x2803

(It also detected correctly the processor's sensors which uses coretemp and works perfectly.)

I have no idea what to do with that ID 0x2803. I looked on SMSC's page (where they seem to have lots of schematics), but I can't figure out what to look for. Google turned out a few pages of with people who have the same thing in their computers, but otherwise no leads. I read most of the lm-sensors wiki but I couldn't find more ideas (other than writing this ticket).

I'm willing to do a bit of searching or hacking, but I have no idea where to start.

---

PS. I'm not sure if this is related or not: I _know_ the laptop has some more sensors available. The i8kutils package on Ubuntu for example can read (and set) the fan speed. (AFAIK there's just one fan in the laptop.) I don't know if it's related to the chip detected above. Either way, isn't there a simple way to get lm-sensors to do whatever i8kutils is doing?

[juergh]

This chip is an unknown chip as sensors reported. SMSC won't provide datasheets for Dell specific chips so we're out of luck. As for i8kutils, it looks like this utility is invoking BIOS routines to get to the HW whereas the hwmon drivers in the kernel directly access the HW. These are inherently different approaches and we can't merge the i8k functionality into the hwmon subsystem.

The only thing left is to determine if the chip in your laptop is compatible with something that we already support. If you want to go that route, please run the following command and send the dell.dump file:

for ldn in seq 0 15 ; do isadump -y -k 0x55 0x2e 0x2f $ldn >> /tmp/dell.dump ; done

[khali]

Well, it shouldn't be too difficult to have the i8k driver register an hwmon class device and export the fan speed and temperature as read-only values in the standard hwmon format. That way the values would be picked by libsensors and would be reported by all libsensors-aware applications, including the "sensors" command-line tool.

[ticket]

The only thing left is to determine if the chip in your laptop is compatible with something that we already support. If you want to go that route, please run the following command and send the dell.dump file:

for ldn in `seq 0 15` ; do isadump -y -k 0x55 0x2e 0x2f $ldn >> /tmp/dell.dump ; done

I've done this and attached the file to the ticket.

(www.lm-sensors.org wasn't resolving for me yesterday, is there a way to answer to these tickets by mail directly?)

Well, it shouldn't be too difficult to have the i8k driver register an hwmon class device and export the fan speed and temperature as read-only values in the standard hwmon format. That way the values would be picked by libsensors and would be reported by all libsensors-aware applications, including the "sensors" command-line tool.

That's what I was thinking about.

--bogdanb