Back in March were patches posted by ARCTIC Cooling for an ARCTIC fan controller driver for Linux . Typically we aren't used to seeing desktop/enthusiast focused vendors providing such Linux drivers for peripherals directly but the sad fact is most often it's left up to the open-source community to reverse engineer and create such drivers for Linux. Making it all the more surprising besides it coming from ARCTIC Cooling directly was that at the time they didn't even have a fan controller product with USB interface. Well, now it's launched and in turn is a great USB fan controller for Linux systems and retails for just $9 USD.

This ARCTIC Fan Controller driver was upstreamed for Linux 7.2 , which debuted as stable this past weekend . It was at the end of July meanwhile that ARCTIC Cooling announced their new fan controller with USB monitoring/control and at that point the Linux driver was already in the mainline kernel tree.

In 22+ years of reviewing Linux hardware at Phoronix , this is the first time I have seen a PC enthusiast focused vendor provide a fan controller driver to the mainline Linux kernel driver pre-launch... And for the likes of other brands like Thermaltake, Corsair, NZXT, etc, have never directly contributed any Linux kernel drivers. So kudos to ARCTIC Cooling for upstreaming this Linux kernel driver and even getting it mainlined before shipping the product.

This ARCTIC Fan Controller is a 10-port fan controller with individual PWM regulation. There is the USB interface for monitoring while the fan controller is powered via a SATA power adapter.

ARCTIC provides a Windows driver/software for controlling the fans while on Linux is where there is this now-mainlined support. ARCTIC Cooling kindly provided a review sample for Linux testing at Phoronix.