This is where the pwmconfig program comes in.

If you try to run the program it will complain that a config file (/etc/fancontrol) is missing. The fancontrol program won't run right off without some user intervention. If you are running version 2.8.7 or above then I am sure it will work just fine.

So in short, if you have sensors working and you are running version 2.8.3 of sensors or above then this will most probably work. It was in version 2.8.7 of lm_sensors that support for the new sysfs naming scheme was added. However, it wasn't until version 2.8.3 that support for kernel versions 2.6 was added. Pwmconfig and fancontrol are new programs and were added to lm_sensors in version 2.8.0. As my two fan headers are dead I cannot give you an idea of how well this works but hopefully some brave soul from the forums can help me out hereīefore I begin describing how to get this working I want to mention a few things about versions. So how do these programs work? There is almost no documentation so I did some digging and messing about. I guess it is possible to control the third fan header as well (provided that it is connected to a pwm output) but playing around with this can also result in the fan being turned off which could of course have disasterous effect so it is not advisable. While the w83782d provides 4 different pwm controls, the user will only be able to control the speed of two fans (the CPU fan headers) because the program depends on having a tach output for reading the speed of the fan.

The purpose of these two programs is to allow the user to control the fan speeds through the pwm control provided by chips such as the w83782d. They are called pwmconfig and fancontrol. After a bit more reading I found out some interesting programs in the sensors package that are not well known.

Fan control software linux