Some Older Intel Tablets Finally Seeing Working Touchscreen With Linux 5.7

While Intel's open-source Linux hardware support is extremely good even in time for launch day of not only for their server / data center products but also desktop and mobile platforms, occasionally there are exceptions. One of the biggest exceptions over the past decade has been the Bay Trail support sometimes taking years to see fixes or finishing up areas of the support. The latest example of this is some Intel Bay Trail and Cherry Trail tablets finally seeing working/reliable touchscreen support on Linux 5.7.

Bay Trail on Linux has been beset by a recently corrected time drifting bug, broken hibernation support after a regression, and even regressions breaking the Linux support for periods of time. The 22nm Bay Trail Atoms have been around since 2013 and in 2020 there still are fundamental fixes around their Linux support.

The latest to report for Linux 5.7 is that various Bay Trail and Cherry Trail devices are finally seeing working touchscreen support for different issues plaguing the hardware in the past. This long overdue support came thanks to Red Hat's Hans de Goede for tackling updates to the Goodix driver for enabling it to work on Bay/Cherry Trail. Hans de Goede has also addressed other Bay Trail Linux shortcomings in recent time.

Some of the many affected devices that either had non-working touchscreen support or had quirks like not working after suspend included the likes of the Trekstor Primetab S11B, GPD Pocket, and other devices. The Goodix driver improvements with these Bay/Cherry Trail specific changes were sent in today as part of the input updates for Linux 5.7.