Linux 6.5 Bringing Sensor Monitoring To Many More Desktop Motherboards

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 6.5 Bringing Sensor Monitoring To Many More Desktop Motherboards

Among the many interesting changes that landed the past two weeks for the Linux 6.5 merge window, the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates as a whole standout for bringing numerous desktop motherboards and other devices to now enjoy working sensor monitoring support under Linux...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.5-HWMON

[zexelon]

This is awesome news! Now do they have any monitoring for the Mellanox cards yet?

[MorrisS.]

HWMON works as a tool?

[Keith Myers]

Is kernel 6.5 actually going to load the nct6775 driver natively, without jumping through hoops and force-loading for the nct6799D support of the Asus Crosshair X670 Hero?

[yump]

HWMON works as a tool?

The tool is the sensors command, provided by the lm_sensors package on most distributions. HWMON is the sysfs API it uses, which can be explored under /sys/class/hwmon. Unfortunately the numbering isn't stable, but there's usually a way to resolve that by going through /sys/devices/platform or /sys/devices/pci*. My video card, for example, keeps its sensors at /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0/hwmon/*/.

[Keith Myers]

That's the problem with all prior kernels. The lm-sensors, sensors-detect can't find the nct6799D SIO chip after probing all the possible locations. You have to have gotten clued in by the user community to figure out the actual hardware address that it is located and force-load the driver at the location.

That is the question I am asking. Has it been coded in for the proper address in the 6.5 kernel yet?

[MorrisS.]

The tool is the sensors command, provided by the lm_sensors package on most distributions. HWMON is the sysfs API it uses, which can be explored under /sys/class/hwmon. Unfortunately the numbering isn't stable, but there's usually a way to resolve that by going through /sys/devices/platform or /sys/devices/pci*. My video card, for example, keeps its sensors at /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0/hwmon/*/.

Many thanks. So, which sensor tools take benefit from HWMON?

[yump]

Many thanks. So, which sensor tools take benefit by HWMON?

Corectrl can read it and control fan speeds, if your Super I/O chip's driver supports that, although the main utility of that application is GPU overclock/undervolt application profiles.

KDE Plasma has a sensor framework that reads it, so you can make taskbar and desktop widgets, or a page in system monitor like this:



There's probably at least one Gnome extension for the same thing.

Htop and btop can display CPU temperature, and are probably using hwmon for that.

The /r/unixporn window manager lovers are probably doing something with conky or Eww. I don't know what the current popular Wayland-friendly thing is.

lm_sensors includes it's own basic fan control shell script, "fancontrol", and a wizard to configure it, "pwmconfig", although I think it only supports simple linear temperature -> pwm mapping, and is not user-friendly for interactive tuning.

And of course you can always hack up your own daemon. It's just reading and writing some files in /sys/.

[HerrLange]

can somebody explain me this commit?

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/drivers/platform/x86/gigabyte-wmi.c?h=v6.5-rc1&id=6f37c034313701a0d5a4255ad4e7c38db2d50844

I was about buying a mobo from the list. Do I now have to force the driver loading?

[yump]

can somebody explain me this commit?

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/drivers/platform/x86/gigabyte-wmi.c?h=v6.5-rc1&id=6f37c034313701a0d5a4255ad4e7c38db2d50844

I was about buying a mobo from the list. Do I now have to force the driver loading?

I only looked at the diff, but I think it will now load on any motherboard that seems like it could work, whether it's on the list or not, without forcing. Presumably any motherboard on the list was tested to work by somebody, so buying one off the list should still be a good choice.

The kernel is not maintaining the list of known-good motherboards anymore. Of course, that leaves up-in-the-air the question of whether anyone is maintaining a list of known-good motherboards.