Lenovo Yoga C630 Snapdragon Laptop Seeing Fresh Linux Improvements

When it comes to Linux on Arm laptops the recent excitement has been around the Asahi Linux porting work for the Apple M2 MacBooks and Linux 6.0 supporting the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 and the flagship Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Arm laptop. Launched a few years ago though was the Lenovo Yoga C630 powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 and thanks now to the work of Linaro that older Arm laptop is seeing Linux support improvements.

Launched three years ago was the Lenovo Yoga C630 laptop powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 SoC and with 8GB of RAM, 128GB SSD, and running Windows 10 for Arm.

Going back to 2019 there was early interest and porting work for Linux on the Yoga C630 and the device enjoyed improvements with newer kernels.

But with newer and more powerful Arm laptops since then, the Yoga C630 hasn't attracted as much attention in recent times. Last week though Bjorn Andersson with Linaro posted an embedded controller (EC) driver for the Yoga C630. This new EC driver developed by Linaro allows for providing AC/battery status, USB Type-C alternate mode handling for DisplayPort, and related EC tasks.

Due to the hardware being buggy/quirky took some effort getting this support under Linux. Bjorn Andersson explained:

The Yoga C630 ships with Windows, where these operations primarily are implemented in ACPI, but due to various issues with the hardware representation therein it's not possible to run Linux on this information. As such this is a best-effort re-implementation of these operations, based on the register map expressed in ACPI and a fair amount of trial and error.

The new driver is now out for review as it works its way to mainline a few years after launch.

The Lenovo Yoga C630 is no longer produced, but if you happen to come across one in a bargain bin or have one collecting dust in a drawer, its Linux support continues to be improved upon for this early Snapdragon laptop.