Newer ASUS Motherboards To See Improved Sensor Handling With Linux 5.18

[bug77]

Did you try using SDIO (Snappy Driver Installer Origin)? While my Asus Z97 Pro Gamer (bought second hand off AliExpress, as I could not find it for cheaper anywhere else) may be old, I had no issue installing all of the drivers for it on Windows 10 LTSC 2019 (I need to find time to replace it with LTSC 2022) on the secondary drive (My main OS remains Linux, with Solus being my distro of choice).

Nope, I tried the old school "go to Intel's webpage and download what's listed there". For the first time in about 20 years of building PCs, this failed. I think it was the actual chipset driver missing (I could only find some INF), causing some peripherals to show up as unrecognized. As lams as it gets, imho.

[middy]

> This ASUS sensor driver work sadly isn't from the company itself but the open-source community

Big hardware manufacturers like ASUS need to be shamed for their lack of contribution to the Linux kernel and for building stuff like this with custom, non-standardized interfaces without documenting it properly. It is such a shame that end users of their hardware had to wait three or more years for full sensor readings of their hardware and that this work actually had to be done by the community by reverse engineering it. This is actively hurting the adoption of Linux among computer enthusiasts.

I am glad though that this is finally implemented in 5.17 and will be further refined in 5.18, and that I'm now able to read the actual full sensor data on my ROG STRIX x570-F gaming mainboard. I will probably take a look at the 5.18 pull request later and add the patches to my 5.17 builds for the next couple of weeks, now that it's been officially submitted. Thank you to the people working on it!

especially when hardware manufacturers in general gladly with glee, hand over documentation and even actual first hand help to literal who software developers for their freeware software on windows.

i present to you, hwinfo:

to rub some salt into the wounds even more, yes, did you know, amd's very own ryzen has l3 cache sensors? per core temp sensors that you can read? hell, even PER CORE power usage! but AMD themselves don't bother release that info for linux, as they do for a literal who program called hwinfo.

[moriel5]

Nope, I tried the old school "go to Intel's webpage and download what's listed there". For the first time in about 20 years of building PCs, this failed. I think it was the actual chipset driver missing (I could only find some INF), causing some peripherals to show up as unrecognized. As lams as it gets, imho.

I personally use a mix of SDIO (mostly), manual download and installation (mainly for GPU drivers, however there are times when I install a specific version of a driver (such as for a smart card reader available in my country, with support for Device Guard) or if it is a modified driver (not necessarily INF modifications), such as the universal Realtek UAD audio drivers), and Windows Update (such as touchpad drivers for certain laptops in the Skylake/Kaby Lake era).

It sounds as though you were having trouble finding Asus's proprietary WMI driver (yes, that exists, even on Windows), my recommendation is to download it from Asus's download page for your specific motherboard, and extracting it and manually installing only the minimum possible (there are reports that it could have an adverse affect on performance, though I did not see any difference on my Z97 Pro Gamer).

[bug77]

I personally use a mix of SDIO (mostly), manual download and installation (mainly for GPU drivers, however there are times when I install a specific version of a driver (such as for a smart card reader available in my country, with support for Device Guard) or if it is a modified driver (not necessarily INF modifications), such as the universal Realtek UAD audio drivers), and Windows Update (such as touchpad drivers for certain laptops in the Skylake/Kaby Lake era).

It sounds as though you were having trouble finding Asus's proprietary WMI driver (yes, that exists, even on Windows), my recommendation is to download it from Asus's download page for your specific motherboard, and extracting it and manually installing only the minimum possible (there are reports that it could have an adverse affect on performance, though I did not see any difference on my Z97 Pro Gamer).

Thanks for the advice, that would explain why Intel's website was failing me. The deed is done now, but I'll keep this in mind going forward.

[BadGuitarist]

This is great. But what would be even more great is if I could put my new Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme motherboard into suspend. Sensor monitoring functionality is very beneficial, but it's a nice to have, while there are essential features that still don't work.

[AngelQC]

"The asus-ec-sensors driver is intended to ultimately replace the asus-wmi-sensors driver merged in Linux 5.17"
"For now both the ASUS EC Sensors and ASUS WMI Sensors drivers will continue to co-exist but the WMI driver is deemed deprecated."

These statements are not true. The WMI driver is not going anywhere as I understand it. A large amount of sensors aren't exposed via the EC and only via WMI. However there are a few that are exposed via EC but not WMI. The EC driver is intended to supplement, not replace, the WMI driver.

Installing the dkms on 5.17 blacklisted the WMI version here. Maybe I will comment this and see if I get all readings, because I don't have the PWM fans on my Crosshair VIII Hero, which annoys me much.

[darcagn]

Installing the dkms on 5.17 blacklisted the WMI version here. Maybe I will comment this and see if I get all readings, because I don't have the PWM fans on my Crosshair VIII Hero, which annoys me much.

For X570 boards, there is no WMI interface unfortunately. I actually upgraded from the Prime X470-Pro to the Crosshair VIII Hero two days ago, though, and all of the PWM fans are available through the nct6798 driver in the kernel.

[BadGuitarist]

This is great. But what would be even more great is if I could put my new Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme motherboard into suspend. Sensor monitoring functionality is very beneficial, but it's a nice to have, while there are essential features that still don't work.

It seems that my blame was misplaced. I've recently upgraded my Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 and the suspend started working even with an older 5.15 kernel.

[AngelQC]

For X570 boards, there is no WMI interface unfortunately. I actually upgraded from the Prime X470-Pro to the Crosshair VIII Hero two days ago, though, and all of the PWM fans are available through the nct6798 driver in the kernel.

I got a noctua PWM for the cpu and I can't get a reading, although I see the PCH/chipset fan, but fancontrol cannot monitor it. I am changing the case fans which are 3-pins and are on the case's fan hub for now, which I can't monitor (Define 7).

My quest started because I get a strange beeping, I don't know from which part exactly, when I go over 40 FPS in Valheim, the only game I play. Nothing is overheating (max 60ish), no clue what's going on, but maybe CPU fan at 0 RPM is triggering something.. the fans are well read in the BIOS tho.