CPU and GPU monitoring on Kubuntu

Need or Curiosity

Sometimes we have the need or the curiosity to know the temps of our hardware and adjust the fans accordingly. On windows it is an easy task using HWiNFO for monitoring, and the proprietary software to control fans; there is a great variety of software to do it.

On Linux (Kubuntu this time), is not that straightforward but it is easy too.

Sensors

Quick Google Search and we get the monitoring software: lm-sensors.

First, we install it:

apt install lm-sensors

Then, scan the system:

sensors-detect

After the scan, we can use sensors to get the temps, but it is not that pretty, so we can install psensor:

apt-get install lm-sensors hddtemp psensor

Now we can open Psensor just as any other application.

Control Fans

Now, the fans. Even though we can use the BIOS settings to control the CPU and system fans, we still need more software to control de GPU ones.

CoreCtrl for AMD GPUs

Using CoreCtrl we can do more than just tweak the fan speeds, but for this time we are only focusing on that.

First, we have to add an untrusted PPA, so proceed only if you can trust it.

add-apt-repository ppa:ernstp/mesarc
apt-get update

Then install corectrl:

apt install corectrl

Again, run CoreCtrl as an application.

There are other ways of installing CoreCtrl on its GitLab repository.

NVIDIA X Server Settings

On System Settings go to Driver Manager > Aditional Drivers and install the NVIDIA driver. Now, more Google Searching:

nvidia-xconfig -a --cool-bits=28 --allow-empty-initial-configuration

This gets us the NVIDIA X Server Settings, that besides other configurations, we can use the Thermal Settings to control the fans.

Now, our reference tell us there is another option to create a fan curve (that needs the previous step in order to enable fan control), but the default nvidia configuration seems to be enough for our needs and curiosity.