Re: EC/sensor support questions

On Fri, 2003-09-12 at 12:46, Johny Mattsson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> My main FreeBSD box has an Elite/ECS motherboard with the ITE8705 
> Environmental Controller/hardware monitor chip, which I'd love to use so 
> that I can monitor the system temperature, voltages, and fan speed.
> 
> At present (well, 5.1-R) there appears to exist no support for this 
> particular chip. Not being deterred by such a fact, I thought I'd grab 
> the specs and write up a driver for it, naively believing that I'd be 
> able to link it in under the smbus code, like the intpm, alpm, et al. 
> Having now read through the docs, it doesn't appear that this chip is an 
> SMBus device. Skimming through the sysutil/xmbmon source supports that 
> impression, as that app only talks to this chipset directly via ISA-IO.
> 
> My questions are:
> - Is it feasible to write a pseudo smb driver that can translate smb 
> requests to a different ioctl interface (or similar), and then write a 
> specific ITE87xx driver to attach to that node?
> 
> - Or is there already a framework or an ioctl set defined for sensors 
> that I could/should be using instead? It appears that Linux has got 
> something like that, but I haven't looked into in any detail (since I 
> don't use Linux...)
> 
> - Would we even want such a thing? I don't think I'd bother spending a 
> lot of time deciphering the specs unless it'd benefit more people than 
> myself.
> 
> - Who would be able to point me to further specs for SMBus/i2c/sensor 
> stuff? This stuff is seriously tedious to google for :/

I would recomment just treating the thing as an ISA device. There is no
standard ioctl api for accessing sensor information from kernel devices
as yet (mainly because there are no kernel sensor drivers). You can do
most of what you need from userland - xmbmon is a good place to start if
it doesn't already support your chip.