Lenovo ThinkPad Palm Sensor Support Coming To Linux 5.11

As part of Lenovo offering Linux pre-loaded on more laptops and desktops, they have been working on upstream improvements themselves along with their partners at Red Hat and others. One of the latest Lenovo-contributed improvements to the kernel is palm sensor support for newer ThinkPad notebooks.

Palm sensor support is being contributed by Lenovo to the Linux 5.11 kernel for their ThinkPad hardware. This is similar to the existing lap sensor support for the ThinkPad ACPI code and allows detecting if a user's palms/hands are near the keyboard area. Like the lap sensor, the palm sensor data is exposed to user-space via sysfs. It's up to the user-space for anything that should be done if the user's palms have been detected near the keyboard.

That new code for the ThinkPad ACPI driver was worked on by Lenovo's Mark Pearson and is queued as part of the x86 platform driver work ahead of the Linux 5.11 merge window next month. Separately also on the way is support for the P15/P15v 1st Gen laptop to support dual fan control with the ThinkPad ACPI driver similar to the support found on other existing ThinkPads with two fans.

The x86 platform driver work can continue to be tracked via this Git repository.