Comment 17 for bug 410596

Got the same problem on E7440. While "smm 30a3" does disable SMM from controlling the fan, it also causes a few side-effects:
- power button stops working (instead of bringing up the options to suspend, restart, ...)
- the brightness buttons (Fn-Up and Fn-Down) stop working
- the wireless switch, when turned back on, doesn't re-enable wireless
- suspend works, but resume is not stable. Sometimes the laptop would resume to being very slow (perhaps SMM thinks that the fan died thus scaling the CPU down to minimum), or it would resume OK then become slow a while later.

As for automating this, I copied "smm" to /usr/sbin, then modified /etc/init.d/i8kmon by adding "/usr/sbin/smm 30a3" to right below the "start)" line. Later on, I put "smm 31a3" right below the "stop)" line (just experimenting), and found that after resuming, the power button, brightness buttons, and wireless switch work normally while the fan is still being controlled by i8kmon. However, the CPU down-scaling still happens once in a while.

I also have an E6440 but it doesn't have this problem, the fan is controlled correctly by SMM, runs pretty slow even while in BIOS. Dell should do something about the E7440 I think.