Lenovo IdeaPad Improvements En Route To Linux 5.12

In addition to Linux 5.12 positioned to see Lenovo laptop "platform profile" support for controlling the power/thermal behavior of their newer ThinkPad and IdeaPad laptops, this next kernel version also has other improvements on the IdeaPad front.

The ideapad-laptop driver has been seeing a number of improvements queued in platform-drivers-x86 ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.12 merge window.

First up there is support coming for controlling the always-on USB charging behavior for various laptops. The always-on USB charging behavior can be toggled on/off via ACPI methods and in turn with Linux 5.12+ will allow enabling/disabling that behavior via a new "usb_charging" attribute in sysfs.

Another user-facing change is keyboard backlight control support for various IdeaPad models.

Along with those controls are various low-level improvements to the Lenovo IdeaPad laptop driver. It's great seeing all of these recent Lenovo laptop improvements upstream in the kernel thanks to Lenovo's increased interest in Linux support and offering more devices with Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora preloaded.

The Linux 5.12 merge window is expected to formally get underway next week while the Linux 5.12 stable release won't be until late April or early May.