New Thermal Library, "Thermometer" Tool Proposed For Linux

Linaro is proposing a thermal library that interfaces with the Linux kernel's thermal framework. As part of this is also a thermometer utility for user-space that would live within the Linux kernel source tree for monitoring the thermal data.

Daniel Lezcano of Linaro sent out a "request for comments" on Monday for a new thermal library implementation he has been working on. This thermal library implements a Netlink notification mechanism to have thermal configuration discovery, trip point changes and violations, and cooling device changes notifications. This abstraction makes it easier for user-space to deal with the Linux kernel's thermal framework.

The thermometer tool built atop this library would allow capturing temperatures from a set of thermal zones specified via a configuration file. This low-overhead tool makes it easy to capture the thermal data and then to feed into other tools like GNU Plot. A fourth patch also provides a basic "thermald" thermal daemon (not to be confused with Intel's Thermald) as an example of writing a daemon around the thermal library.

See more about this thermal library and thermometer user-space utility work for Linux thermal monitoring via the RFC patch series.