Improved Battery Reporting For Newer Logitech Devices Coming To Linux 5.12

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Improved Battery Reporting For Newer Logitech Devices Coming To Linux 5.12

Newer wireless Logitech keyboard/mice supporting "unified battery" reporting will be supported beginning with Linux 5.12 as a newer interface compared to the existing battery reporting support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Logitech-Unified-Battery-Linux

[tildearrow]

Unified battery?...

Does this refer to unified codepath for retrieving battery status or a single shared channel for retrieving battery status?

Or by magic the devices are connected to the same battery?

[stephen.george.west]

I think it is the first thing. The message(https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg3790027.html) said:

> > From: Filipe Laíns <lains@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> > This new feature present in new devices replaces the old Battery Level
> > Status (0x1000) feature. It keeps essentially the same information for
> > levels (reporting critical, low, good and full) but makes these levels
> > optional, the device exports a capability setting which describes which
> > levels it supports. In addition to this, there is an optional
> > state_of_charge paramenter that exports the battery percentage.

[lumks]

Unified battery?...

I'd guess this is just the name for the battery status reported by the unifying receiverse.

[Vistaus]

Not sure why this was needed? Solaar reports the battery status of my Logitech MX Ergo with unifying receiver just fine, so it seems to me like it already works as it should.

[ix900]

Not sure why this was needed? Solaar reports the battery status of my Logitech MX Ergo with unifying receiver just fine, so it seems to me like it already works as it should.

Yeah, my Logi mouse has battery status built into it. Probably certain hardware is necessary or its just an alternative to make the news.

[FFY00]

This exposes the battery in sysfs, making it available to things like upower. Several desktop environments, for eg., will show battery status in the tray, it would be a lot of work to write custom code to get the battery for all proprietary devices, making the kernel aware of the battery level allows these userspace apps to just use that generic interface. Essentially this patch will just make Linux natively aware of the battery status.