Gigabyte Waterforce AIO Cooler Driver Set To Premiere In Linux 6.8

A new driver set to be merged in the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle is "gigabyte_waterforce" as a new kernel driver for supporting Gigabyte AORUS Waterforce AIO coolers.

A few weeks back I wrote about a community-developed Waterforce HWMON Linux driver being developed by Aleksa Savic for exposing various all-in-one liquid cooler sensors under Linux. This hardware monitoring driver, which is similar to several other HWMON drivers for AIO liquid cooling monitoring, is now set to be merged for Linux 6.8.

This past week the Gigabyte Waterforce Linux driver was queued into the hardware monitoring subsystem's "hwmon-next" branch.

The driver in its current form exposes the sensors for the water cooling pump and fan speed as well as coolant temperature. Not yet supported are the RGB LEDs and LCD screen. But there does exist user-space tools via Liquidctl that do support Gigabyte's proprietary HID interface for interacting with the RGB LEDs and LCD display.

So should you happen to be using a Gigabyte Waterforce AIO cooler like the X240 / X280 / X360, you will now be able to monitor the performance come Linux 6.8.