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Fan control on Armbian's Ubuntu 20.04 ROCKPro64 server image

When my old desktop PC that was acting as a home server failed on me recently, I switched back to using my ROCKPro64 for the job. Previously I’d used it with ayufan’s Debian Buster image, but this time I decided to try out Armbian’s Ubuntu 20.04 server image based on the 5.9 Linux kernel. Everything went beautifully – even installing the ZFS DKMS module – except that there doesn’t seem to be any built-in fan control.

Thankfully, this forum post had all the information I needed to eventually get ATS working. However, it took some digging and experimentation, so I’ve documented the process below. (All of these commands should be run as root.)

  1. Load the pwm-fan kernel module:

    # modprobe pwm-fan
    
  2. Install ATS:

    # apt install lua5.3 liblua5.3-dev luarocks gcc make
    # luarocks build https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tuxd3v/ats/master/ats-0.2-0.rockspec
    
  3. Replace hwmon0 with hwmon3 in /etc/ats.conf’s PWM_CTL entry:

    # sed -i 's/hwmon0/hwmon3/' /etc/ats.conf
    
  4. Reboot.

[This page was last updated on January 20, 2021]