Ever since I got my AMD Athlon XP 2500+, I’ve been into overclocking. While my overclocking activities were limited at the time (as a student I couldn’t risk burning up my CPU or motherboard), I made sure that ever since, none of my desktops ran at stock speeds. Even my trusty Intel 2500K that I’m writing this blog on still hums along at 4,4Ghz all core.
Overclocking has always been a Windows thing though, and for good reason; in 2009 the Linux market share was only 0,6%, while Windows dominated the market with a 95% market share. With such a dominating OS, motherboards manufacturers focused fully on (usually terrible) software which allowed you to overclock and monitor your system without leaving Windows. The overclocking community didn’t stop there either, tools like 8rdavcore (apparently ported from Linux), setfsb, MemSet, CPU-Tweaker and many more made it possible to overclock and tweak your system to the max. Combined with a lot of monitoring software like HWInfo, Aida64, SpeedFan, CPU-z and benchmarks like 3Dmark, Sisoft Sandra, Cinebench, and it was clear: overclocking belonged to Windows.
Fast forward to 2025, and things have changed; Linux has a market share of 3% while Windows has dropped to 66%. OCCT is now also available on Linux, GreenWithEnvy makes it easier to overclock NVIDIA gpu’s and benchmarks like y-cruncher, 7-zip and Geekbench run fine on Linux. But when it comes to graphical monitoring applications, we only have Psensor or xsensors. Both work fine but it can still be better.
This is where I want to change a couple of things and after this years release of Java 25 and its Foreign Function and Memory API, I can finally work in a language I love while using C libraries like libsensors, libcpuid, the NVIDIA management API and many more.
After returning from Devoxx I decided to create a Linux alternative to Open Hardware Monitor, HWMonitor and HWInfo and that’s how lnxsense was born. It’s a still in early alpha stages and what it can show depends heavily on what the underlying libraries can return (e.g. NVIDIA’s nvml doesn’t even have an option to get the hotspot temperature or actual fan RPM). Even so, I’m already really happy with what it can do.
In it’s very early stage it supports (when running the back-end server as root)
- CPU Frequencies (as reported by the Linux kernel)
- CPU Utilization
- Memory Utilization
- Core temperatures
- Intel requested VCore (the VID)
- Intel Core multipliers
- Intel Throttling reasons
- Intel RAPL Power Management information like PP0, PP1 and Platform power limits and usage
- NVIDIA Clocks, Utilization, Temperature and Fan speed (in % because why would nvml expose the actual fan speed), P-state and current PCIe speed
- SMART and NVMe log
- Blockdevice IOPS and read/write speed
- Remote monitoring using sockets
If you want to try it out, you can download a release version from Codeberg. Just be sure to read the INSTALL.md, it’s still in early development, so it’s not a one-click experience and definitely not production-ready.
// 2025/12/15: I decided to rename the project from HWJinfo to lnxsense, it just makes more sense, doesn’t it ?
P_W999