Open-Source, Linux Support For Corsair Link Devices Slowly Materializing

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 23 October 2014 at 02:22 AM EDT. 3 Comments
HARDWARE
Corsair Link comes down to a proprietary protocol for allowing Corsair products within the "Link" ecosystem to allow for a centralized, easy-to-use control panel for fans, water coolers, and more. Corsair doesn't provide any Linux support for Corsair Link, but open-source developers are filling in the gaps.

Corsair Link is a 2014 technology described by the memory/PSU/case company as "it had a very rocky start, but continued and continuing development has turned it into an extremely useful combination of hardware and software. It allows you to connect several products within our ecosystem to a software-based control panel, but there's so much more to it than that." Corsair Link, for example, allows controlling fan speeds, RGB LEDs on their water cooling blocks, monitoring fan speeds / temperatures, making various PSU adjustments, support various lighting/cooling modes, and boasts other features. However, this is only officially supported by Corsair's Windows customers.

Phoronix reader Henrique Lechner wrote into Phoronix this week to share that open-source fans have been trying to provide some level of Linux support for those having Corsair products supporting this USB-based Link protocol.

CorsairLinkPlusPlus is one of the projects working on open-source Corsair Link support with a basic driver, a simple command-line interface, a web service and rest API for viewing the Link data via a web interface, etc.

OpenCorsairLink is another project just trying to provide Corsair Link support to OS X and Linux users. So far the support there appears limited to the Corsair H100i Water Cooler.

Lastly, within the Corsair Forums is information about the reverse-engineered Link USB protocol. The developer doing that work is hoping to write a Linux kernel driver for Corsair Link.


Corsair Survivor GT testing at Phoronix many years ago... Well before Corsair Link devices.

While several years back there's been many Corsair reviews on Phoronix under Linux going back a decade, I haven't heard much from their media/PR folks in recent years, but hopefully we'll be able to provide some new Corsair product reviews on Phoronix in the near future to see how they are working and performing under Linux.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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