Improved ASUS Motherboard Sensor Monitoring To Arrive With Linux 5.18

While Linux 5.17 is introducing the ASUS WMI EC Sensors driver for greatly expanding Linux's support for hardware sensor coverage on newer ASUS desktop motherboards, already with Linux 5.18 that driver will be deprecated to make way for a new ASUS EC sensor driver replacement.

Back in January I wrote about the new ASUS EC Sensor driver that was being written for greater flexibility and faster sensor reading compared to that new WMI sensor driver. This latest driver polls the embedded controller (EC) directly rather than going through the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interface, which leads to much quicker sensor reading.

The hardware coverage at the moment is basically the same among the ASUS desktop motherboards, but this new driver will read the sensors quicker and ultimately more flexible with interfacing with the EC directly.

This weekend the driver was queued in hwmon-next, making it among the hardware monitoring subsystem updates now set to be introduced with the Linux 5.18 kernel this spring. A follow-up commit in hwmon-next already deprecates the asus_wmi_ec_sensors driver that appeared in v5.17.

Currently supported ASUS motherboards include:

- PRIME X570-PRO
- Pro WS X570-ACE
- ROG CROSSHAIR VIII DARK HERO
- ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO (WI-FI)
- ROG CROSSHAIR VIII FORMULA
- ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO
- ROG CROSSHAIR VIII IMPACT
- ROG STRIX B550-E GAMING
- ROG STRIX B550-I GAMING
- ROG STRIX X570-E GAMING
- ROG STRIX X570-F GAMING
- ROG STRIX X570-I GAMING

It's also quite likely more motherboards will be added over the coming weeks for still making it into Linux 5.18. The asus_ec_sensors driver can expose the chipset temperature, CPU package temperature, motherboard temperature, VRM temperature, CPU fan RPMs, chipset fan RPMs, VRM heatsink fan RPMs, water flow meter header RPM, water in/out temperature header, CPU current, and other possible metrics exposed by the embedded controller on supported motherboards.