Upstreamed to the Linux kernel last year was the alienware-wmi-wmax driver for enabling thermal control support on various Alienware and Dell G-Series systems. Being merged today as a “fix” for Linux 6.15 is extending that thermal control support to a number of additional Dell/Alienware systems.
This support extends the number of systems supported by the Alienware WMI WMAX driver that provides a thermal interface akin to the Alienware Command Center on Windows for dealing with thermal profiles. This Linux driver was reverse-engineered by the open-source community rather than being contributed by Dell (owners of Alienware) and these new additions again are coming by looking at ACPI dumps and figuring out additional hardware that can be supported.
The newly-supported systems by this Alienware WMI Linux driver include:
– Alienware Area-51m R2
– Alienware m16 R1
– Alienware m16 R2
– Dell G16 7630
– Dell G5 5505 SE
The Alienware M16 R1 is also being extended with G-Mode support, which is a gaming performance boosting feature.
More details on these new additions merged today for the Linux 6.15 cycle and ahead of Linux 6.15-rc3 coming out on Sunday can be found via this x86 platform driver merge.
