ASUS laptops support a feature called "Whisper Mode" that intentionally slows down the fan speed and lowers the CPU clock speed in order to keep the device running cool and quiet. The open-source ASUS Armoury Linux kernel driver is now seeing patches to properly support this Whisper Mode on Linux.

Thanks to reverse engineering work by the open-source community, the WMI device IDs around Whisper Mode were figured out for enabling/disabling the Whisper Mode feature as well as figuring out its status.

This patch series sent out today gets Whisper Mode supported by the ASUS Armoury Linux kernel driver for those interested in operating their ASUS laptop in this mode for making it more quiet at the cost of performance. With the patches, added to sysfs is whisper_mode as the toggle for the BIOS-level Whisper Mode control or whisper_enable for Dynamic Whisper run-time control. These new sysfs attributes are only added on ASUS laptops where the WMI support is detected. There is also whisper_status for reading the Whisper Mode status.