Monster Center

A Linux control centre for the Monster TULPAR T5 V21.4. This unit is a Tongfang GM5MG0Y barebone (the system serial number starts with GM5MG0Y), with an AMI Aptio BIOS (N.1.08MON06) and an ITE embedded controller behind the memory window the DSDT declares as ECMG at 0xFE410000. It replaces the Windows-only Monster Control Center with the parts that can actually be controlled on this board, and it shows the readings the vendor tool shows.

Tested on this machine: Pop!_OS 24.04, kernel 7.1, i7-10875H, RTX 3060 Laptop GPU, EC firmware 1.17.

What it does

Monitoring (1-2 s refresh)

• CPU package and per-core temperatures, current and allowed frequency, governor, energy preference, turbo state, package power from RAPL
• RTX 3060 temperature, load, clocks, VRAM use and power draw
• Fan levels, board and GPU temperatures from the embedded controller
• Chipset, two NVMe drives, Wi-Fi temperatures
• Battery level, charge state, AC adapter
• System RAM and swap, used and total, from /proc/meminfo

Controls (verified on the hardware)

• Five power profiles: Silent, Balanced, Performance, Gaming, Battery saver. Each one sets the CPU package power limits (RAPL PL1/PL2), the intel_pstate energy preference and turbo boost. After applying one, the daemon reads the values back from sysfs and reports what is really in place, so a write the firmware ignores shows up as a failure instead of a silent success
• The Performance page shows the mode that is in effect: the profile name, its live PL1/PL2, energy preference and turbo state, the time it was applied, and the active profile button is highlighted. A hand tuned limit or energy preference falls back to "Custom", and a mismatch between the profile and the live values is called out in the same card
• Manual CPU power limits, governor, energy preference and turbo boost
• Graphics mode switch through system76-power (hybrid, integrated, nvidia), needs a reboot
• Keyboard backlight: four addressable zones, colour and brightness (0 to 50), set for all zones at once or one colour per zone
• Automatic thermal guard: caps CPU power in 5 W steps when the package passes 90 C and restores the profile once it drops to 82 C

Power-mode key

• The chassis key next to the power button switches the embedded controller's power mode. The firmware owns the state and its LED; this project reads that state from the EC, applies the matching profile (power limits, energy preference, turbo, clock ceiling, GPU limit) and shows a desktop notification naming the mode, so the LED, the popup and the CPU settings move together

Known limits on this model

The CPU mode is the intel_pstate energy preference, not the governor. The governor stays on powersave because HWP does the scaling; the profile's energy preference (power, balance_power, balance_performance, performance) sets how hard the CPU pushes. The governor also has to stay there: while a policy runs the intel_pstate performance governor the kernel rejects energy preference writes with EBUSY, so a profile click would set its power limits and then fail on the preference. set_epp falls back to powersave when it meets that state, and the Performance page explains the split under Processor policy.

The fans stay under embedded controller control. The DSDT does declare manual duty for both fans in the extended part of the EC window (0xE8C holds F1DC and F1CM, 0xE9D holds F2DC and F2CM). Writing 0x80 | duty there is accepted and reads back, but in a 20 second test at 100 % the fan level registers did not move and the fan speed fields at 0xE1C stayed at zero. The EC keeps its own curve, which you can see in the live fan level, so the app offers no manual fan slider. CPU power limits are the effective lever for cooling this machine.

The keyboard backlight works. This is the ITE 8291 zone firmware: USB 048d:ce00 with bcdDevice 0.02, which speaks the four-zone protocol tuxedo-drivers ships as ite8291_zones and Rainexn0b/keyRGB calls ite8291_zones_clevo. The per-key 8291r3 protocol that ite8291r3-ctl sends to 048d:6005 rev 0.03 is accepted by this firmware and then ignored, which is why earlier attempts looked dead. Colours, per-zone colours and brightness (0 to 50) are verified on the hardware; there is no per-key or effect mode on this firmware.

The NVIDIA driver on this unit does not report a settable GPU power limit (nvidia-smi -pl returns no value), so that control appears disabled.

Install

Requirements: a Debian based distro with systemd (tested on Pop!_OS 24.04), Python 3 with GTK 3 (python3-gi, gir1.2-gtk-3.0), and the hardware listed above. Root is needed for the install only.

git clone https://github.com/justbasicfacts/monster-center.git
cd monster-center
sudo ./install.sh

The installer copies the app to /opt/monster-center, installs the root services (monster-center and monster-center-powermode), the user-session popup service for the account that ran the installer, a launcher in /usr/local/bin, a desktop entry, and sets ec_sys to read-only mode for the fan and temperature reads.

Start the GUI from the application grid ("Monster Center") or with monster-center gui.

Check the power-mode bridge:

systemctl status monster-center-powermode          # root side, reads the EC
systemctl --user status monster-center-powermode-popup
python3 -m monster_center.powermode status         # needs PYTHONPATH=/opt/monster-center

Power-mode key

The key next to the power button is not a keyboard key: the embedded controller handles it, changes its own fan curve and lights the small mode LED. The mode lives in extended EC RAM at 0x0751, which the DSDT exposes through the 0xFE410000 window, so it can be read without any vendor driver:

0x0751 & 0xB0	Mode	CPU profile applied
0xA0	Silent	PL1 20 W / PL2 25 W, energy preference power, turbo off, 2.3 GHz ceiling
0x00	Balanced	PL1 35 W / PL2 45 W, balance_power, turbo on, full clock ceiling
0x80	Auto (LED off)	same as Balanced
0x10	Performance	PL1 55 W / PL2 70 W, performance, turbo on, full clock ceiling

monster-center-powermode reads the byte every 250 ms, waits until a value has held for a second (the EC passes through 0x80 for a moment while switching) and publishes the mode to /run/monster-center/powermode. The user service monster-center-powermode-popup follows that file, applies the profile through the daemon and calls notify-send.

Two gotchas on this board, both handled by the reader:

• The mode byte is in the extended area; the first 256 bytes of the window read as zero and the ordinary ec0/io debugfs node cannot see it.
• TUXEDO Control Center's tuxedo_keyboard driver writes 0x0751 to balanced at load and swallows the key as a Meta+Alt+F6 shortcut, which pins the LED in the middle and stops the firmware from switching modes. If you have it installed, keep that module out of the way:

printf 'blacklist tuxedo_keyboard\ninstall tuxedo_keyboard /bin/false\n' \
  | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-tuxedo-keyboard.conf
sudo modprobe -r tuxedo_keyboard tuxedo_io

Keyboard RGB is unaffected: it comes from the separate ite_8291 module.

Use from the terminal

monster-center status                 # live summary
monster-center profile list           # available profiles
monster-center profile silent         # power limits, EPP, turbo
monster-center cpu --epp power --turbo off
monster-center power --pl1 30 --pl2 40
monster-center gpu --power-limit 90   # if the driver allows it
monster-center graphics hybrid        # reboot required
monster-center led --rgb 60,110,255 --brightness 35    # all four zones
monster-center led --zones "255,45,45;40,220,90;60,110,255;255,90,190"
monster-center led --brightness 15    # brightness only, keeps the colours
monster-center led --off

Root is never needed for the CLI or the GUI: both talk to the daemon over /run/monster-center/sock, which is owned by root and your primary group.

How it is built

monster_center/hardware.py   sysfs, EC, RAPL, nvidia-smi, system76-power
monster_center/daemon.py     root service, unix socket, profiles, thermal guard
monster_center/gui.py        GTK 3 front end
monster_center/cli.py        command line front end
monster_center/led.py        ITE 8291 four zone protocol for the keyboard backlight
monster_center/powermode.py  EC power-mode key bridge (watch as root, popup in the session)

The daemon runs as root under systemd, so the GUI stays unprivileged. The socket carries line based JSON, one request and one reply per connection.

Embedded controller notes for this board

Mapped from the DSDT (OperationRegion ECMG, SystemMemory, 0xFE410000, 0x00010000) and confirmed by live probing of /sys/kernel/debug/ec/ec0/io, which mirrors the first 256 bytes of that window. The DSDT field names are in brackets.

Offset	Meaning
0x36	CPU package temperature, CPTM at window 0x43E
0x3E	board / chipset temperature
0x4F	GPU temperature, VGAT at window 0x44F
0x60	fan 1 level, 12 bit, plus FFAN in the upper nibble
0x68	fan 2 level, 12 bit, plus SDAN in the upper nibble
0x751	firmware power mode, bits 0xA0 / 0x10 / 0x80 (see Power-mode key)

The upper nibble of the fan bytes carries a mode value, the lower 12 bits are the level (0 to 4095). Reading them needs ec_sys, which the installer keeps in read-only mode.

Extended fields the DSDT declares, readable only through the EC window:

Window offset	Field	Meaning
0x783	APL1 / APL2 / APL4	CPU power limits the BIOS sets through the vendor ACPI method
0xE0D	CPUT / PCHT	CPU and chipset temperatures
0xE1C	F1SH / F1SL	fan 1 speed, 16 bit
0xE8C	F1DC (7 bit) + F1CM (bit 7)	fan 1 duty and manual enable
0xE9D	F2DC (7 bit) + F2CM (bit 7)	fan 2 duty and manual enable
0xEA2 onward	UVER, CCI, CTL, MGI, MGO	vendor command mailbox and firmware version

The vendor control path runs through the ACPI method T1WR in _SB.INOU, which the Windows tool uses for power limits, brightness and the mailbox. An earlier build of this app assumed a Clevo barebone and tried Clevo's fan command 0x99 and its LED mailbox at 0xF8 to 0xFD, neither of which exists on a Tongfang board, so those attempts could not have worked.

Uninstall

sudo ./uninstall.sh