HP BIOS Management/Configuration Driver Coming For Linux 6.6

Similar to the Dell WMI system management driver and Lenovo's Think-LMI driver, the HP-BIOSCFG driver now poised for introduction in Linux 6.6 allows for managing and configuring BIOS settings on capable HP laptops/desktops from under Linux itself.

Being worked on since last year has been HP-BIOSCFG to manage HP BIOS settings under Linux with capable BIOS tunables then exposed under sysfs. Some of HP's more commercial/business-minded systems have a Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interface for managing BIOS settings from within the operating system environment. HP business laptops going back to 2018 and newer should, for example, work with this driver.

The HP-BIOSCFG Linux driver has undergone a number of rounds of review the past number of months but is finally ready for mainline. Red Hat's Hans de Goede last week queued all of the HP-BIOSCFG patches into platform-drivers-x86.git's for-next branch. This Linux driver was worked on by HP directly and with it now making its way to the respective "-next" branch should then be merged for the Linux 6.6 kernel cycle barring any new issues from appearing that would prevent its inclusion.

The driver documentation patch outlines some of the secure platform manager (SPM) features exposed through this BIOS configuration driver, in addition to the common BIOS settings also exposed by the other vendor BIOS configuration/management drivers on Linux.