Linux 5.6 "HWMON" Changes Sent In With Big AMD Improvements

Following the Linux 5.5 kernel release one of the first pull requests sent in is for the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates. Dominating the HWMON interest this cycle is a long overdue SATA temperature monitoring driver and vastly improving the k10temp driver for AMD Zen desktop and server CPUs.

The SATA drive temperature driver for capable Serial ATA drives is long overdue. This generic driver allows reporting SATA drive temperatures via the kernel using existing HWMON infrastructure, unlike existing tools running in user-space and requiring root access just to read SATA drive temperatures... Way long overdue especially with Linux 5.5 having already merged its equivalent NVMe drive temperature driver. Plus now integrating nicely with all the Linux utilities polling the exposed HWMON sensors.

The other big item of HWMON for Linux 5.6 are the improved AMD CPU temperature and voltage/current reporting for Zen/Zen+/Zen2 processors. There is greatly expanded CPU temperature reporting and until now the mainline driver hasn't supported any AMD power readings for Zen-based processors. That's all been changing. I've personally been testing these changes a ton and happy to see them finally materialize for mainline.

Besides these two big improvements are also various other HWMON driver changes as outlined via the Sunday night pull request.