Mac mini and FreeBSD - fans

[Peter Grehan]

> I noticed you had commited some of the changes to the base
> system, so I rebuilt my Mac-mini with the system as of about
> February 8th.  (I was going to rebuild it again today, but
> I was sidetracked by completely unrelated stuff).

  I'm still getting to some of the mods (and also bugfixes)...

> Since rebuilding, I have seen one case where the machine just
> locked up.  No error messages, no panic messages, but it was not
> listening to the keyboard or allowing any ssh connections.  It is
> probably obvious for me to say:   I don't know what that was.

  Yeh, it's hard to diagnose those.

> One thing that I have noticed:  After the machine has been running
> freebsd for awhile (maybe 30-minutes to an hour), the fans in the
> Mac-mini are going at full blast.  I don't know if the machine
> thinks it is overheating.  This happens even when I'm not doing
> much on it, and if I run 'top' it shows the machine is over 95% idle.

  I suspect it might be something like the G5: there's an external 
microcontroller that handles the fans, and if it's not communicated 
with, it drives the fans up to full speed. This happens within a couple 
of minutes on the G5 and takes the fans up to industrial-strength vacuum 
  cleaner volume :)  Sounds like it takes a while longer on the mini.

later,

Peter.