I’ve tagged the second Release Candidate build for OpenRGB 1.0. This build has quite a few user interface improvements over the previous 1.0rc1 release candidate build as well as some new device support and bug fixes. However, the main reason for this release candidate is that Microsoft has started flagging the WinRing0 driver we use for low-level IO (SMBus, Super-IO, etc) as vulnerable and Windows Defender is now tampering with OpenRGB installations, deleting this driver and breaking access to RAM and motherboard RGB controls. We have been working to replace WinRing0 with a new driver called PawnIO (https://pawnio.eu/) which is more secure as it keeps all of the SMBus controller accessing code kernel-side in signed Pawn modules. Now that we’ve resolved all of the bugs with PawnIO, I’ve decided to make a release candidate both to sunset the old WinRing0 support as well as introduce the new PawnIO support. For this reason there are two 1.0rc2 versions for Windows - 1.0rc2wr0 (with WinRing0) and 1.0rc2 (with PawnIO). PawnIO has two major caveats compared to WinRing0 which is why I wanted to publish a final WinRing0 build - it doesn’t support 32-bit and it requires Administrator access all the time. If you have a use case where you need a 32-bit OpenRGB build that can access SMBus, you’re stuck with WinRing0. Going forward, the OpenRGB Windows Installer gives you the option to install OpenRGB as a system service, which gets around the Administrator requirement by running the OpenRGB backend as a service. The GUI can then be used as a normal user, it just connects to the service using the SDK protocol instead of connecting directly to hardware. However, there are some UI inconveniences that running as a service still has (settings changes only affect the local copy, not the service, so configuring manually added devices, disabling devices, etc. requires manual config tweaking for the service’s copy of the settings files).

I still want to do one major rework before 1.0 final. This will focus on some plugin API changes and SDK protocol changes to hopefully make using OpenRGB in client/server mode a better experience.

I have also tagged 1.0rc2 builds for the OpenRGB plugins. These rc2 builds of the plugins will work with OpenRGB 1.0rc1 and 1.0rc2.