Gigabyte Motherboard WMI Temperature Driver Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.13

Earlier this month I reported on a WMI temperature driver for Gigabyte motherboards being worked on by an independent developer. That "gigabyte-wmi" driver is now slated for inclusion in the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle.

This driver exposes the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) temperature sensors under Linux. When writing originally about this new driver it was only tested on a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro WiFi motherboard but since then has been tested and confirmed to also be working on the likes of the Gigabyte's B550M DS3H, B550 Gaming X V2, and Z390 I Aorus Pro WiFi motherboards as well.

It's likely this driver will also work on other similar Gigabyte motherboards sporting the ITE ASIC for management and monitoring. This WMI ACPI driver was used rather than the existing hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem's ITE i87 driver since the Super I/O range used by that driver is already claimed and used by the system firmware. The gigabyte_wmi.force_load=1 kernel module parameter can be used for force loading this driver on other Gigabyte motherboards that have yet to be formally tested.

Since yesterday this Gigabyte WMI temperature driver was queued up into platform-drivers-x86's for-next making it part of that pull request to Linux 5.13 once the merge window formally opens in the next week or two. This ~200 lines of code WMI temperature driver was written by Thomas Wei�schuh, an open-source independent developer.