NVIDIA GPU Fan Controller for linux

A simplified (and a litle 'opinionated') Python based implementation of NVIDIA GPUs fan controller.

$ DISPLAY=:0 python3 nvidia_fan_controller.py --help
usage: nvidia_fan_controller.py [-h] [--interval-secs INTERVAL_SECS] [--base-temp BASE_TEMP] [--log-level {DEBUG,INFO,WARN}]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --interval-secs INTERVAL_SECS
                        number of seconds between consecutive updates
  --base-temp BASE_TEMP
                        base temperature used for fan speed ramp (degrees Celsius)
  --log-level {DEBUG,INFO,WARN}
                        verbosity level

This script uses an adhoc heuristic algorithm, increasing the GPU fan speed based on GPUs temperature and utilization. The implementation keeps GPUs 'silent' when idle: all GPUs temperature are smaller than a certain threshold (default is 40 degrees Celsius) and GPUs utilization are less than 10%. When GPUs are busy and getting hot, the highest GPU temperature is used to decide how fast ALL the fans should spin.

Dependencies

The nvidia_fan_controller.py script does not depend on any other python libraries. It does, however, require the following two command-line utilities:

• nvidia-settings
• nvidia-smi

Please make sure that these are installed on your system.

Also, make sure that you've enabled manual fan control on your system. This can be done by using the nvidia-xconfig command-line utility:

nvidia-xconfig --enable-all-gpus
nvidia-xconfig --cool-bits=4

Credits

Thanks Kristian Holsheimer for nvidia-fan-controller original code.

Contributing

To check the script for inconsistencies, I run:

virtualenv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install pycodestyle
pycodestyle --max-line-length=160 nvidia_fan_controller.py
DISPLAY=:0 python3 nvidia_fan_controller.py --log-level DEBUG