Intel engineer David E. Box posted a 17-patch series on May 26 to the platform-driver-x86 mailing list, proposing a new command-line tool called pmtctl for the Linux kernel source tree. The tool targets Intel Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT), an existing kernel-supported framework that exposes per-component hardware telemetry counters through sysfs via the pmt_telemetry auxiliary bus driver. While PMT kernel support has been in the mainline tree for several years, pmtctl provides a convenient user-space interface for querying those metrics — similar in concept to existing kernel-tree utilities like turbostat. The series would introduce approximately 7,000 lines of new code across a reusable library (libpmtctl_core), a thin CLI frontend, code generation scripts, and documentation, living under tools/arch/x86/pmtctl/.
The library handles device enumeration by scanning /sys/bus/auxiliary/drivers/pmt_telemetry, reading GUIDs and telemetry data paths from sysfs, and mapping each sample’s fields against platform-specific metric definitions. PMT’s design is deliberately hardware-agnostic: rather than hard-coding register layouts in kernel drivers, a GUID read from hardware points to an external metric definition file that describes what each field in the sampled data means. This allows telemetry definitions to be updated as firmware or hardware changes without requiring kernel patches. The pmtctl series aims to make that interface consumable directly from the command line without requiring users to write their own sysfs-parsing code or manage external tools.