Linux Gets A Reverse-Engineered Driver For ASUS ROG NVMe Enclosure RGB Lighting

If you are into RGB lighting, you can even find NVMe external enclosures these days with RGB LEDs like the ASUS ROG Strix Arion. Now thanks to reverse engineering there is a Linux driver for allowing the RGB lighting controls for the ASUS ROG Strix Arion NVMe enclosure.

Open-source developer Liang Haowen developed "leds-asus-aura-scsi" as a Linux driver now under review for enabling the RGB lighting controls on this external NVMe M.2 SSD enclosure. The enclosure is exposed as a plain USB mass storage device and works fine on Linux for typical functionality. The RGB lighting was discovered to be controllable by an ENE controller via vendor SCSI commands. There are four independently addressable LEDs on the hardware that can then be manipulated under Linux via the LEDs sysfs interface.

This driver was posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list as a request for comments (RFC). It's also part of a broader effort going on for a shared ASUS Aura interface for Linux. We'll see if/when this RGB LED driver for the ASUS ROG Strix Arion NVMe enclosure makes it to the mainline kernel.

For those wondering, the ROG Strix Arion retails for around $52 USD on the likes of Amazon (affiliate link) for this otherwise ordinary NVMe enclosure.