Gigabyte B660 GAMING X DDR4 To Have Working Temperature Sensors With Linux 5.18

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Gigabyte B660 GAMING X DDR4 To Have Working Temperature Sensors With Linux 5.18

Sent in as a "fix" this week for the Linux 5.18 kernel and to be found in tomorrow's 5.18-rc5 release is supporting sensor readings with the Gigabyte-WMI driver for the Gigabyte B660 GAMING X DDR4 motherboard...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Gigabyte-B660-GAMING-X-Sensors

[tildearrow]

These features were so Windows-specific that even the Linux driver has Windows on its name (WMI: Windows Management Instrumentation)...

[horizonbrave]

Could you please enlighten me and tell which is the most Linux friendly motherboard manufacturer?
Do you know is Supermicro does a good job with their sensor in supporting Linux? (I know their focus is on another market segment, but I'm curious).
I just feel like voting with my wallet, if you excuse my naivety.

[NotMine999]

horizonbrave

I have owned at least 3 different models of older Supermicro motherboards. All of these boards had sensor chips that were easily found by the "sensors-detect" program in the "lm-sensors" package that is available in most (if not all) Linux distributions.

If I remember correctly, you can review the online data and motherboard manuals of all Supermicro motherboards BEFORE you even make the purchase. Then you can investigate the motherboard to see if it is appropriate for your purpose.

[mihau]

Could you please enlighten me and tell which is the most Linux friendly motherboard manufacturer?
Do you know is Supermicro does a good job with their sensor in supporting Linux? (I know their focus is on another market segment, but I'm curious).
I just feel like voting with my wallet, if you excuse my naivety.

My experience with Asus B550i has been pretty good, with decent hwmon drivers- though that's not because Asus supports Linux users, but more likely because they have a sizeable Linux community - and UEFI updates installable via fwupd (just download the .cap from asus's website and install it with fwupdtool)

[skeevy420]

Could you please enlighten me and tell which is the most Linux friendly motherboard manufacturer?
Do you know is Supermicro does a good job with their sensor in supporting Linux? (I know their focus is on another market segment, but I'm curious).
I just feel like voting with my wallet, if you excuse my naivety.

I have the Gigabyte DS3H mentioned in the article and I'm happy with it. On a budget I found it was easier to settle with Linux friendly hardware.

[DanL]

When are mobo manufacturers going to stop plastering "Gaming" all over their products? It's lost all meaning, especially with the awful GPU market.

[tildearrow]

When are mobo manufacturers going to stop plastering "Gaming" all over their products? It's lost all meaning, especially with the awful GPU market.

Yeah, I agree. I can't imagine seeing "Gaming" products being used at work.

[Adarion]

When are mobo manufacturers going to stop plastering "Gaming" all over their products? It's lost all meaning, especially with the awful GPU market.

Moreover, they put weird stuff on these boards, plus often silly layout (PCI/PCIe slots blocking each other; though this is a generic problem) and a lot of useless paint and covers. Besides, what exactly makes it "gaming"? The most important chips are usually the same. Oh, and RGB stuff. Please. No more.

[Adarion]

Could you please enlighten me and tell which is the most Linux friendly motherboard manufacturer?
Do you know is Supermicro does a good job with their sensor in supporting Linux? (I know their focus is on another market segment, but I'm curious).
I just feel like voting with my wallet, if you excuse my naivety.

This is probably hard to answer. The devil is in the detail. I had/have a good bunch of boards (for a private person) from various vendors, normal AT, ATX, Mini-ITX and some thin client and laptop boards. A pretty good one I once had in a GeodeLX based ThinClient (iirc. TECO mainboard made for Fujitsu-Siemens back in the days), but this is likely not your target currently.
It's also not easy to say "Vendor A is stupid and B is not." This is more model specific.
Of course, server mainboard vendors have to take Linux / Unix into account much more, but some might actually then have only Enterprise distributions supported and these might even come with blobs. Well, there are few companies like PCEngines, Pine, System76, Tuxedo, Raptor Engineering which either make their own boards (or have them made by contracts) or use select components and do have a very good FOSS support, some even come with Coreboot.
Normal market mainboards... phew. I can for the larger part only tell from my own experience.

You might want to separate this in two parts:
a) the chips used and how these are supported (e.g. SuperIO-Chips (aka SIO or EC (embedded controller), network chips, "chipset" and so on)
b) software-ish side and how things might be wired up and generic support

for a)
This one is partially hard. Chipset is obvious, it usually is something intel or AMD these days. Those usually work since both have a decent Linux support. However, be aware, some "intel" labeled things aren't actual intel (see Poulsbo etc. in the past, which actually was ImgTec and wouldn't work in Linux).
LAN chips etc. are usually described on the website so you can check.
SIOs, however, often aren't. And this is where we come to sensors, flashrom support and the likes. In a few cases these are mentioned in the manual. Photos of the mainboard are rarely large enough to read the type. I can spot the logo of the chipmaker, but ITE... some are supported (it87 driver) but some aren't. You need the very type and look that up. And you can just hope to either find a large enough photo or have some website that actually reviewed the board _and_ cared to mention this chip.
for b) this is ACPI tables and compiler used for those, BIOS/UEFI setup, and we all know UEFI itself is crap by design, strange readings of sensors, S2RAM/wakeup issues and so on. Much harder to spot pre-sales, one can only look for reviews.

Most companies also make board that are later relabeled for thin clients and sometimes laptops or business machines (e.g. frmom HP).

Gigabyte: YMMV. Some are working pretty nice, some won't, some are okay-ish but have quirks. Michael from Phoronix iirc. once had a support contact with them (years ago) and wasn't overly pleased with the answer.
MSI: Usually worked for me. Produced a board with a good board layout with no slots blocked. So far also BIOS updates were okay. My board was sold out but still received/s updates.
Asus: One famous. Don't be fooled by laurels from the past. They still do have some very good boards, but sadly also a few messed up things in between. A more steady quality would be great.
(their enclosed W32 software often is crap and their daughter company ASMedia did have some nasty mess-ups on some bridge chips (esp. PCIe2PCI). Some other chips work like a charm.)
ASRock: From the days where they used the sweepings off Asus' grounds grew to a good manufacturer. Had few boards yet, though.
Jetway: Overall fairly good, though my experiece is mostly for older Mini-ITX solutions. Much into industrial style things. Contact once was okay, but couldn't help. They sold some Marvell SATA card addon (great idea for Mini-ITX to have a PCI as pin header and then the parallel to the mainbaord mini-daughterboard, but these Marvell's wouldn't work with linux or only one old kernel version)
Zotac: Hadn't had one yet, but once a pre-sales support which was awesome. The dude seriously knew even the flash memory chip's type. Iirc. they have some Mini ITX once in a while and some tiny barebone computers.
Biostar: YMMV. BIOS updates are usually rare, you get what you buy (cheap). Had some AM1 boards which are pretty fine, but also had a rubbish board on AM3.
Some of their BIOS/UEFI setups are silly, white text on a stylized photo that had large white light reflections as background. Thus, white text on white background.
Support... what support?
Elitegroup/ECS/Shuttle/... do they still exist?
Foxconn: iirc. rarely offered their own brand, usually contractor and makes stuff for others. Was in the media for bad treatment of workers. (But you never know if that happens in other places, too.)

You can check support sites if they mention Linux at all. Some will at least mention it and tell you to ask chip manufacturers for drivers and the likes (which is okay IMO, since you usually don't "download drivers" on Linux). Though very few mention if their boards are tested with Linux.