Dell Data Vault WMI Interface Reverse-Engineered For New Linux Sensor Driver

A new open-source driver has been posted for supporting the WMI interface found with newer Dell systems. This platform driver allows for reading battery properties like the temperature and IDs as well as additional fan/thermal sensor information.

While Dell has contributed a lot over the years to the upstream Linux kernel, this dell-wmi-ddv driver was not developed by them but rather reverse-engineering by an independent developer, Armin Wolf. Right now the battery information is being exposed while the additional sensor data still being reverse-engineered is dumped via DebugFS for easier analysis in the reverse engineering process.

This WMI interface being reverse-engineered and supported by the dell-wmi-ddv driver is also called the DDV - Dell Data Vault. So far this new driver has just been lightly tested on one newer-ish Dell system, an AMD Ryzen powered Dell Inspiron 3505.

Those interested in learning more about this in-progress Dell WMI sensors driver for Linux can see this kernel mailing list patch series. In current basic form this driver is just around 500 lines of new code.