EC/sensor support questions

[Johny Mattsson]

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 :/

TIA,
/Johny