Linux 5.17 Bringing New Driver For Some NZXT Lighting/Fan Controls & Monitoring

Thanks to the reverse-engineering, open-source community there has been mainline Linux driver support for select NZXT all-in-one water cooling solutions while for the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel is another new NZXT driver for some of their other products.

Thanks to independent developer Aleksandr Mezin, Linux 5.17 is slated to introduce the "nzxt-smart2" driver as part of the kernel's hardware monitoring subsystem.

This driver allows for monitoring and controls of connected fans and RGB LED lighting control support. The hardware supported by this hwmon driver include the NZXT RGB & Fan Controller and the NZXT Smart Device v2.

NZXT RGB & Fan Controller

The NZXT RGB & Fan Controller is a $25 device for RGB lighting and fan control support. There is support for two NZXT RGB lighting channels and three fan channels.

NZXT H710i is one of several NZXT enclosures featuring the Smart Device v2 controller.

The NZXT Smart Device v2 is found pre-installed into select NZXT computer cases for LED lighting and fan control, such as their H-Series cases.

These NZXT devices are officially supported under Windows with the company offering drivers and convenient control software. Now for Linux users with the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel there is this community-created nzxt-smart2 driver.At the moment the driver is in hwmon-next until the Linux 5.17 merge window opens in January.

This kernel driver exposes the controls and monitoring to user-space via sysfs. Users can interact with sysfs directly or via various scripts and user-space software like Liquidctl for enhancing the control support under Linux.