Linux 5.17 To Allow Setting Custom Fan Curves For ASUS ROG Laptops

The Linux kernel continues to see improvements around ASUS laptop support on Linux, but the contributions have not been coming directly from the company but rather the community and sometimes after reverse-engineering.

The ASUS-WMI driver has seen a great deal of work recently in the Linux kernel for improving the device support particularly with the higher-end ASUS laptops. There has been dGPU toggling, panel overdrive, platform profile support, and more. Much of this work has come thanks to Linux kernel developer Luke Jones.

In recent months Luke has been working on custom CPU/GPU fan curve support under Linux, similar to what is allowed under Windows. That is the latest work now on the way for the Linux 5.17 cycle.

Queued this past week into the x86 platform drivers "for-next" branch is the custom fan curve support.

For newer ASUS ROG laptops the CPU and GPU can curves can be set via ACPI methods. To user-space this can then be manipulated via the hwmon sysfs. Getting this support in place is nearly 600 lines of code to the ASUS-WMI driver.

Look for this functionality in Linux 5.17 that will come after the new year.