ChromeOS EC Hardware Monitoring Driver Being Revived For Framework Laptops

In addition to a Framework Laptop EC driver being prepared for Linux that extends the Chrome OS embedded controller (EC) used by recent Framework Laptops, a ChromeOS EC hardware monitoring (HWMON subsystem) driver has also been revived as a further support extension for Framework laptops on Linux.

Complementing the Framework Laptop EC driver that is an extension of the functionality provided by the Google Chrome OS EC driver, a EC HWMON driver patch series was posted this week for exposing hardware monitoring support with this embedded controller. Back in 2017 was the original attempt for such an HWMON driver to report fan and temperature readings from the Chrome OS Embedded Controller. That driver never was revived nor making it to the mainline kernel. But now Thomas Weißschuh who has been working on the Framework Laptop EC driver has taken to updating this "cros_ec_hwmon" driver.

This cros_ec_hwmon driver is a re-implementation of that prior 2017 driver while adapting to newer Linux kernel APIs and supporting more features. This driver has been tested on the Framework 13 AMD laptop to report additional fan and temperature data.

The revised driver is now on the Linux kernel mailing list for review and will hopefully be followed through with upstreaming when ready.