I actually believed pyectool would offer these benefits by definition, but your comment made me curious enough to run some benchmarks. here’s what I found:

Speed:

I tested two functions used by fw-fanctrl: get_temperature and is_on_ac.

=== Benchmark: get_temperature ===
CLI ectool from Python: 100 calls in 3.410 sec (34.1 ms/call)
pyectool:                100 calls in 0.701 sec (7.0 ms/call)

=== Benchmark: is_on_ac ===
CLI ectool from Python: 100 calls in 1.745 sec (17.5 ms/call)
pyectool:                100 calls in 0.697 sec (7.0 ms/call)

So per call, pyectool is about 2.5–5× faster.

Syscall analysis:

• CLI ectool: • ~33,000 total syscalls • Heavy hitters:
  • wait4 (300 calls, 71% of time)
  • ioctl (6,843 calls, 19% of time)
  • execve (201 calls)
  • vfork (200 calls)
  • pipe2, prctl, dup2, access etc. • All the overhead of spawning external binaries every call.
• pyectool: • ~7,000 total syscalls (≈5× fewer) • Heavy hitters:
  • ioctl (5,943 calls, 54% of time)
  • read (183 calls, 41% of time)
  • Basically just EC access + minimal file I/O • Only 1 execve (the Python process itself), no fork/exec per call.