ASUSTOR Lockerstor Gen2 on TrueNAS: fan control, power button shutdown, and status LEDs don't work

I run TrueNAS SCALE on an AS6704T. When the machine is under sustained load, the fan stays at a fixed low RPM. The IT8625E Super I/O has full PWM fan control - TrueNAS just never touches it. That’s a thermal problem on a machine I’m trusting with production data.

Three things don’t work on Lockerstor Gen2 hardware (AS6702T, AS6704T, AS6706T):

1. Fan controlThe IT8625E Super I/O defaults to a fixed 20% PWM regardless of CPU or disk temps. Under a resilvering workload, drive temps will climb with no response from the fan. The hardware can do temperature-based PWM curves via pwm1 at /sys/devices/platform/asustor_it87.*/hwmon/hwmon*/. Nothing in TrueNAS tells it to.

2. Power buttonPressing the physical power button does nothing - it’s unregistered on Gen2. The community driver README notes Power Button support exists only for the older AS6 series. On a machine running ZFS, that means someone physically powers it off mid-write without a clean unmount. That’s not a UX issue - it’s a data integrity risk.

3. Status LEDsDisk activity and error LEDs are static without the platform driver loaded. A degraded pool shows the same LED state as a healthy one. In any deployment where you’re not watching a dashboard all day, the LEDs are your first signal something is wrong.


Why this is solvable with existing work

The community driver mafredri/asustor-platform-driver already handles LEDs and buttons via standard Linux leds-gpio and gpio-keys-polled. It was updated in December 2025 for Linux ≥ 6.17 compatibility and includes dkms.conf for kernel-upgrade rebuilds. The fan control path via the asustor-it87 module and fancontrol is documented at blog.tangrs.id.au. Both work today - as manual scripts you have to babysit after every TrueNAS update.

That’s the problem. Manual DKMS builds and init scripts that break on updates are not reasonable for a production NAS OS. The driver is GPL-2.0 licensed. The hardware mapping is documented. The ask is inclusion, not research.


Workarounds

Two exist. The simpler one - a single isaset call to set a fixed PWM duty cycle - works without any kernel module but provides no temperature-based scaling. The fuller solution uses the asustor-it87 DKMS module with fancontrol, but on TrueNAS SCALE 25.x this requires enabling developer mode via install-dev-tools. iX explicitly flags that doing so causes them to automatically reject any support requests on that system. So the choice is: fixed fan speed that doesn’t respond to load, or full fan control that puts you outside iX support. Neither is acceptable for a production deployment.


Note on scope

A separate request for generic native fan control across all hardware was recently closed - iX said they won’t be adding that. This request is narrower: it’s about one specific chip (IT8625E) on one specific platform family, where a GPL-licensed driver already exists and has been maintained by the community since 2021. The integration work is small. The safety case is real.


Prior request

[Not Accepted] Asustor AS6706T fan control Community Edition covered fan control only and didn’t get enough votes. An AS6706T owner confirmed this is still broken on CE 25.04.1 - idle CPU at 60°C with the fan running at fixed low speed. This post covers the full picture: thermal management, clean shutdown, and health LEDs. If you’re on Lockerstor Gen2 hardware and hitting any of these, please vote.

Ask ASUSTOR to upstream their crappy drivers, then everything will work out of the box. What happens if this is installed on a system with the same CPU, but incompatible GPIO endpoints? The module literally bypasses the sanity checks done to ensure the Kernel driver doesn’t accidentally fry unknown IT86/IT87 fan controllers.

iX Systems certainly aren’t going to include unofficial, unverified, reverse engineered DKMS modules in all of their TrueNAS installs just so a few locked down, proprietary NAS boxes have blinky lights. That’s what the unsupported dev tools are for: making unverified changes to the system.

This is the sort of stuff that just can’t be deployed to every random system and hardware combination out there: asustor-platform-driver/patches/001-ignore-pwm-polarity-it87.patch at main · mafredri/asustor-platform-driver · GitHub

PWM control borked… Anyways, send more power…

It might be fine if it’s manually installed on specifically an ASUSTOR NAS box, but just having that sanity check patched out of every installed TrueNAS Kernel isn’t safe for anyone.

They appear to be matching against ANY:

  • GeminiLake Platform with generic Insyde BIOS code
  • Jasper Lake Client Platform with generic Intel Corporation BIOS code

That’s potentially HUNDREDS OF DIFFERENT device combinations: Mini PCs, Firewalls, other manufacturers NAS boxes, even Laptops. And on all those devices the sanity check to make sure the Kernel doesn’t damage the fan controllers (if they happen to be detected by the “extended” driver) is bypassed.

This is specifically for ASUSTOR devices with no significant boundaries to make sure it doesn’t go nuts on other hardware. So the USER needs to make sure it’s ONLY INSTALLED ON ASUSTOR devices, not just included by default in a TrueNAS Kernel running on thousands of different hardware combinations.

1 Like