PDP Xbox One Controllers Should Now Work With The Linux 4.15 Kernel

One of the last minute changes sneaking into the Linux 4.15 kernel is support for PDP Xbox One controllers.

Linux supports a variety of Xbox controllers and various offshoots while now the controllers from Performance Designed Products is the latest. PDP Xbox One Controllers can be found at a variety of Internet retailers but up to now hasn't played nicely with the Linux kernel: the devices are rather peculiar about their initialization sequence and needed some extra packets before sending any input reports.

Given the small change needed to the XPad driver for getting PDP Xbox One controllers supported, it was sent in as part of the input fixes that were merged last night to mainline rather than having to wait until the Linux 4.16 merge window.

At least in the US these PDP Xbox One controllers appear to be quite common and sold from a variety of shops, so nice to see them now playing nicely under Linux for gamers.

So if you have a PDP Xbox controller, it should now be working nicely in time for the Linux 4.15 stable debut this weekend. Also worth noting is this update has better support for trackpoints on newer Lenovo devices manufactured by Elan/ALPS/NXP that only implement a subset of the original ThinkPad trackpoint capabilities.