Corsair Commander Pro Driver On-Deck For Linux 5.9 Kernel

For those looking for an RGB lighting and fan speed controller system that works under Linux, the Corsair Commander PRO is slated to see support with the upcoming Linux 5.9 kernel cycle.

A new driver for the Corsair Commander Pro was queued up on Thursday into hwmon-next as material for the Linux 5.9 merge window in August. The Corsair Commander PRO supports commanding up to six cooling fans, two LED channels, and sports four temperature sensors while interfacing with the system via USB.

The Linux driver for the Commander Pro sadly isn't come from Corsair but rather the community via reverse-engineering the USB protocol. Last month I wrote of the Linux patches for the Corsair Commander Pro and it's those patches that are now part of the hardware monitoring subsystem for Linux 5.9.

The driver is named corsair-cpro and supports reading fan speeds, temperature sensors, voltage values via the SATA power connector, and modifying the PWM values for the fans. Currently there is no LED lighting control support. The voltage reading via the power connector does indeed work for +3.3V, +5V, +12V lines. The driver can be interfaced via sysfs. With this driver jiving with hwmon, the values can be read by some HWMON utilities in user-space but otherwise lacks any nice GUI panel like Corsair users find on Windows.

Aside from the lack of a nice user-interface utility and no LED controls, this Corsair Commander Pro driver appears quite in good shape for its upcoming introduction in the mainline Linux kernel. I am tempted to pick one up simply for having a somewhat portable 3.3/5/12V voltage reader for power supply testing that works nice under Linux considering the lack of most motherboard (voltage) sensor support on Linux. The Commander Pro retails for about $70 USD.