Re: Placement of ASUS Aura and platform/x86 ASUS files relocation
From: Armin Wolf
Date: Tue Aug 04 2026 - 14:30:00 EST
Am 04.08.26 um 19:46 schrieb Denis Benato:
Hi all,
I write this mail to ask a few questions related to the various ASUS devices in the kernel both present and futures and how to organize that work.
To understand this mail one needs to know that AURA is the name of the lighting ASUS gave to its
products: each device is divided in one or more zones and each zone supports setting an effect like
static (1 color), strobe (2 colors and speed), rainbow (0 colors), rain (0 colors and speed), laser (1 color and direction) and these, to be represented in such a way features are not being lost requires a ned interface
that Derek said he wanted to develop as many other hardware would benefit from it: I will therefore need
to specialize it for ASUS things: where is it better to put any .c/.h file related to this interface? Is platform-x86 OK?
The Aura interface has components (all or only certain aspects) working via: scsi, (hid) usb + i2c and wmi.
1. Liang Haowen has an ASUS nvme enclosure that supports the AURA protocol as scsi commands:
we want those to be in the kernel, but we don't know where to put the aura userspace interface (see above).
Hi,
it depends on the userspace interface. If you use the LED sysfs API (with some extensions for the effects), then i suggest
that you place the driver in drivers/leds, because the NVME enclosure is not a platform device.
I assume you refer to the ROG Arion? If the SCSI commands are used to issue i2c/smbus requests, then you should also
place the i2c controller driver under /drivers/i2c/busses.
2. ASUS has product called "RTX Spark" coming that are arm and will support acpi: I have no idea if the asus-wmi
interface would be reused, but if they decide to do so (and the kernel can be made to boot lol) would platform/x86 still be the best place for ASUS drivers?
In such a case, moving the affected drivers to drivers/platform/asus/ would be a good idea. There is currently a patch series pending
for enabling ACPI-WMI on arm, so _theoretically_ the asus-wmi driver should work.
3. During the upstreaming of asus-armoury Hans de Goede asked if it's preferred to have an asus directory containing asus drivers, but the discussion died there. Now that I see there is a patchest that will also move asus files
would it be a good time to spawn this discussion?
IMHO having a separate asus directory for all asus-related platform drivers would indeed be very nice. You could reuse the drivers/platform/asus directory
for that, and leave the older asus-related drivers inside drivers/platform/x86 for the time being.
Alternatively, you could move all the affected drivers to drivers/platform/x86/asus, and after that move this directory to drivers/platform.
Thanks,
Armin Wolf
Thank you all for your time.
Best regards,
Denis Benato