Inspiron 5000, N3700 processor bug: fan doesn't stop spinning & is very loud

Question

I have a Braswell N3700 processor, Dell Inspiron 5000. It comes with Ubuntu 14.04, and works well. I reinstalled the system with Ubuntu 16.04 and now the fan doesn't stop spinning and it's very loud. I see the psensor info and the fan rpm is 0, the processor temperature is 40 C, and the thermald displays a bug on status message. Does anyone know how to fix this issue?

I think I may need a proprietary driver for thermal control. The Dell website has a proprietary driver for windows, not for Linux. The name is "thermal control". I think this may be the problem.

Anybody know a good open-source driver that can fix this error?

output of thermald service thermald status:

caio@caio-Inspiron-5452:~$ service thermald status
● thermald.service - Thermal Daemon Service
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/thermald.service; enabled; vendor preset:
   Active: active (running) since Dom 2017-05-21 14:17:17 BRT; 41min ago
 Main PID: 877 (thermald)
   CGroup: /system.slice/thermald.service
           └─877 /usr/sbin/thermald --no-daemon --dbus-enable

Mai 21 14:17:11 caio-Inspiron-5452 systemd[1]: Starting Thermal Daemon Service..
Mai 21 14:17:17 caio-Inspiron-5452 systemd[1]: Started Thermal Daemon Service.
Mai 21 14:17:17 caio-Inspiron-5452 thermald[877]: 11 CPUID levels; family:model:
Mai 21 14:17:17 caio-Inspiron-5452 thermald[877]: Polling mode is enabled: 4
Mai 21 14:17:17 caio-Inspiron-5452 thermald[877]: Using generated /var/run/therm
Mai 21 14:17:18 caio-Inspiron-5452 thermald[877]: sysfs read failed max_brightne
Mai 21 14:17:18 caio-Inspiron-5452 thermald[877]: sysfs write failed trip_point_
lines 1-14/14 (END)

Answer 1

Thermald was buggy in early versions of 16.04. Update to 16.04.2 and it should be ok.

Thermald comes with a default configuration file at /etc/thermald/thermal-conf.xml that will control most computers, but may need to be customized for some computers. See man thermal-conf.xml for some details and examples. Once one has modified the configuration file, stop thermald and restart it:

sudo service thermald restart

After installing thermald, I'd stop the thermald process, and run it manually as sudo thermald --no-daemon to watch its actions in real time. This real time info can be used to create your own customized thermal-conf.xml file. See man thermald for more information.

sudo service thermald stop
sudo thermald --no-daemon --loglevel=debug

You can search for thermald here on Ask Ubuntu to see what previous answers there are.

A good starter reference is at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/ThermalIssues