Intel Graphics Driver With Linux 6.12 Will Finally Report Fan Speeds

Intel has submitted more kernel graphics driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle. Following the pull requests to DRM-Next last week to enable Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics and Battlemage by default, some more lingering feature patches were merged today. Most exciting with this last round of patches before Linux 6.12? Intel graphics card fan speed reporting is finally wired up for their Linux driver.

Two years ago for the Intel discrete graphics cards the developers integrated hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem reporting of energy/power and voltage metrics. But to date hasn't been possible to read the fan speed for connected Intel discrete graphics cards under Linux. Ahead of the Battlemage launch, this fan speed reporting is finally landing.

After the HWMON fan speed patch for the i915 driver went through seven rounds of review, it's finally ready for merging with the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle. The few dozen lines of code enable Intel GPU fan speed reporting via hwmon via the "fan1_input" attribute also accessible over sysfs. The fan speed in RPMs is reported. Example from LM_Sensors' sensors command now:

It's surprising it took so long for this seemingly mundane feature, but it will be here with Linux 6.12. The HWMON fan speed reporting was sent in as part of today's drm-intel-gt-next pull request.