Many x86 Laptop Improvements In Linux 6.10 Plus Acer ARM Laptop

The x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.10 merge window. The platform-drivers-x86 changes continue to primarily revolve around x86 Intel/AMD laptops but also some other desktop/platform drivers. Now in Linux 6.10 there is also a new "ARM64" sub-section of the platform drivers.

The ARM64 directory has been added to the platform-drivers-x86 pull. This new ARM64 area is added for the Acer Aspire One laptop EC driver as the first and only driver in this new ARM64 platform driver folder. The Acer Aspire One ARM laptop launched in 2021 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c eight-core SoC, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of eMMC storage. Three years later with Linux 6.10 there is now "almost full" support for this laptop although later this year there will be more exciting Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X laptops and other contenders out there like the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s.

Over in the x86 space, the Linux 6.10 updates include adding a backlight driver for the Dell All-In-One (dell-uart-backlight) systems, a Lenovo WMI camera button driver, Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 Pro 1380F/L fast charging support, a new MSI WMI platform driver for initially reporting fan speeds, and improvements to existing drivers.

On the existing driver side, the ASUS WMI driver has added support for the 2024 ROG Mini-LED, MCU powersave support, Vivobook GPU MUX capabilities, and other enhancements. The Lenovo IdeaPad laptop driver now exports the FnLock LED as a LED class device and supports switching ACPI platform profiles on laptops with a thermal management key. The Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver has reworked hotkey support, support for using the new trackpoint-doubletap, and other improvements. The Microsoft Surface drivers meanwhile now have fan profile switching support and Surface Pro thermal sensors support.

There are a number of Intel platform driver enhancements in Linux 6.10. The Intel work includes enhancing their In-Field Scan (IFS) driver, Lunar Lake support within the PMC driver, enhancements to the Software Defined Silicon (Intel On Demand) driver, and Intel Speed Select improvements. The Intel On Demand driver work this round includes adding an in-band BIOS lock, an attribute to read the current meter state, and other fixes.

The full list of x86 platform driver feature updates for Linux 6.10 can be found via this pull request that has already landed in Linux Git.