NAME
aibs —
ASUSTeK AI Booster voltage,
temperature, and fan sensor
SYNOPSIS
aibs* at acpi?
DESCRIPTION
The
aibs driver provides support for voltage, temperature, and
fan sensors available as an ACPI device on ASUSTeK motherboards. The number of
sensors of each type, as well as the description of each sensor, varies
according to the motherboard.
The driver supports an arbitrary set of sensors, provides descriptions regarding
what each sensor is used for, and reports whether each sensor is within the
specifications as defined by the motherboard manufacturer through ACPI.
The
aibs driver supports
envsys(4) sensor states as
follows:
- Voltage sensors can have a state of ‘valid’,
‘critunder’, or ‘critover’; temperature sensors
can have a state of ‘valid’, ‘warnover’,
‘critover’, or ‘invalid’; and fan sensors can have
a state of ‘valid’, ‘warnunder’, or
‘warnover’.
- Temperature sensors that have a reading of 0 are marked
‘invalid’, whereas all other sensors are always assumed
valid.
- Voltage sensors have a lower and an upper limit,
‘critunder’ and ‘critover’, temperature sensors
have two upper limits, ‘warnover’ and ‘critover’,
whereas fan sensors may either have only the lower limit
‘warnunder’, or, depending on the vendor's ACPI
implementation, one lower and one upper limit, ‘warnunder’ and
‘warnover’.
Sensor values and limits are made available through the
envsys(4) interface, and can be
monitored with
envstat(8). For
example, on an ASUS V3-P5G965 barebone:
$ envstat -d aibs0
Current CritMax WarnMax WarnMin CritMin Unit
Vcore Voltage: 1.152 1.600 0.850 V
+3.3 Voltage: 3.312 3.630 2.970 V
+5 Voltage: 5.017 5.500 4.500 V
+12 Voltage: 12.302 13.800 10.200 V
CPU Temperature: 27.000 95.000 80.000 degC
MB Temperature: 58.000 95.000 60.000 degC
CPU FAN Speed: 878 7200 600 RPM
CHASSIS FAN Speed: 0 7200 700 RPM
Generally, sensors provided by the
aibs driver may also be
supported by a variety of other drivers, such as
lm(4) or
itesio(4). The precise
collection of
aibs sensors is comprised of the sensors
specifically utilised in the motherboard design, which may be supported
through a combination of one or more physical hardware monitoring chips.
The
aibs driver, however, provides the following advantages
when compared to the native hardware monitoring drivers:
- Sensor values from aibs are expected
to be more reliable. For example, voltage sensors in many hardware
monitoring chips can only sense voltage from 0 to 2 or 4 volts, and the
excessive voltage is removed by the resistors, which may vary with the
motherboard and with the voltage that is being sensed. In
aibs, the required resistor factors are provided by the
motherboard manufacturer through ACPI; in the native drivers, the resistor
factors are encoded into the driver based on the chip manufacturer's
recommendations. In essence, sensor values from aibs are
very likely to be identical to the readings from the Hardware Monitor
screen in the BIOS.
- Sensor descriptions from aibs are more
likely to match the markings on the motherboard.
- Sensor states are supported by aibs.
The state is reported based on the acceptable range of values for each
individual sensor as suggested by the motherboard manufacturer. For
example, the threshold for the CPU temperature sensor is likely to be
significantly higher than that for the chassis temperature sensor.
- Support for newer chips in aibs. Newer
chips may miss a native driver, but should be supported through
aibs regardless.
As a result, sensor readings from the actual native hardware monitoring drivers
are redundant when
aibs is present, and may be ignored as
appropriate. Whereas on some supported operating systems the native drivers
may have to be specifically disabled should their presence be judged
unnecessary, on others the drivers like
lm(4) are not probed provided that
acpi(4) is configured and the
system potentially supports the hardware monitoring chip through ACPI.
SEE ALSO
acpi(4),
envsys(4),
envstat(8)
HISTORY
The
aibs driver first appeared in
OpenBSD
4.7, DragonFly 2.4.1 and
NetBSD 6.0. An earlier
version of the driver, named
aiboost, first appeared in
FreeBSD 7.0 and
NetBSD 5.0.
AUTHORS
The
aibs driver was written for
OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, and
NetBSD by
Constantine A.
Murenin
⟨
http://cnst.su/⟩,
Raouf Boutaba Research Group, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science,
University of Waterloo.
Jukka Ruohonen
⟨jruohonen@iki.fi⟩ later reworked and adjusted the driver to
support new ASUSTeK motherboards. The earlier version of the driver,
aiboost, was written for
FreeBSD by
Takanori Watanabe and adapted to
NetBSD by
Juan Romero
Pardines.