Linux 5.7 Seeing Updates For Intel SpeedSelect Technology, Jasper Lake PMC

Andy Shevchenko submitted on Tuesday the x86 platform driver updates targeting the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window.

Highlights of the platform-drivers-x86 updates for Linux 5.7 include:

- Many improvements to the Intel SpeedSelect Technology support on Linux, including Cascadelake-X updates, displaying the enabled CPU core count, improved error reporting, and many fixes. Intel has been working on SST support since Linux 5.3 for dealing with these more granular power/performance controls on Cascade Lake and newer CPUs.

- An ASUS WMI driver fix where the first battery is simply named "BATT" without a number.

- Intel PMC (Power Management Controller for the PCH on Intel SoCs) support for the Atom-based Jasper Lake.

- Support for the power integrated circuit driver on the Microsoft Surface 3 laptop. Yes, the device from 2015 and the first to utilize an x86 processor in the form of an Intel Atom X7-Z8700. This "surface3_power" has been floating around in patch form since at least 2019 for enabling support for the ACPI operation region of the Surface 3 battery platform driver and worked on by Red Hat. While finally in 2020 it's been picked up for mainline.

The complete list of these changes, which were already merged to mainline, via this mailing list post.