In over 22 years of Linux hardware reviews and testing at Phoronix, I have never been more excited for a fan controller... ARCTIC today launched their new Fan Controller and in making the product very unique for Linux users, it already has mainline Linux kernel support via a open-source driver contributed directly by ARCTIC.

Back in March ARCTIC Cooling published a fan controller driver for Linux to support up to 10 fan channels and nicely integrate with the Linux HWMON interfaces for fan control and monitoring. It was a bit confusing at first as the existing ARCTIC fan control products didn't have any USB interface for communication with the system and thus not clear what it associated to.

ARCTIC continued working on their fan controller driver and became clear it was for a new/unreleased product. That driver was mainlined for the Linux 7.2 kernel that will be out as stable during the second half of August.

What makes this so unique is that long-time Linux users know that typically fan controller vendors don't typically provide any Linux support, especially anything pre-launch. Typically any desktop fan control drivers for Linux is most often left up to passionate Linux/open-source customers that take to any reverse engineering and creating a driver themselves. In this case ARCTIC not only contributed an open-source driver to the mainline kernel but did so ahead of the product launch. Kudos to them as I don't recall any similar situation in the desktop fan control space previously. In fact, rather sad that this is exciting in 2026 with more desktop PC cooling vendors not contributing more directly to the Linux kernel.

This morning they announced on X that the new "ARCTIC Fan Controller" has launched. They note this 10-channel fan controller is even "open-source and Linux ready" in their announcement.

Beyond that they note on the product page the Linux support. There is Windows and macOS support too.

This new fan controller is surprisingly cheap too. The initial Amazon.com product page (affiliate link) puts this Linux-friendly fan controller at just $9 USD. ARCTIC will be sending over a review sample soon for confirming the Linux driver support and testing in a future Phoronix article.