Intel's Laptop Hinge Sensor Driver Sent In For Linux 5.12, Other Staging/IIO Work

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the staging/IIO updates for the Linux 5.12 kernel and this time around are lighter than normal but still with a few interesting items worth mentioning.

Greg noted in the pull request, "Nothing really huge in here, the number of staging tree patches has gone down for a bit, maybe there's only so much churn to happen in here at the moment." At least a few items still worth mentioning for staging/IIO in Linux 5.12.

There is now hinge sensor support added to the hid-sensors code. This addition in the IIO subsystem is for ultimately being able to report a laptop's hinge/keyboard angle with that work being led by Intel. The angle between the lid/screen and the base/keyboard is calculated with supported laptops and the screen / keyboard angles with respect to the ground level is also calculated and exposed. This data is then exposed to user-space for adapting user interfaces and more based on those factors.

Following WiMAX being demoted in Linux 5.11 where it was punted to staging for possible removal in the future, there have been some code clean-ups and other work to that code. The WiMAX code will likely still get dropped in the future given the minimal to no active users who are also relying on the latest kernel releases, but we'll see moving ahead how long it lasts in mainline.

There are also many cleanups to the HiKey 9xx driver code. Additionally, cleanups to Realtek network drivers like rtl8723bs and rtl8192u, among other smaller patches.