Linux 5.16 Improves Laptop Support For System76 & HP Omen, Better AMD S0ix

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 8 November 2021 at 03:27 PM EST. 1 Comment
HARDWARE
The platform-drivers-x86 pull is exciting as usual for the in-development Linux 5.16 kernel.

Linux 5.16 is carrying a lot of new x86 platform driver work, including items such as:

- System76 laptop support improvements including battery charging threshold support for laptops using their open-source EC firmware, reporting of temperatures and fan speeds, and Fn+F2 function behavior for OLED laptop models.

- The HP WMI driver is adding support for HP Omen laptops. This gets fan speed monitoring, ACPI Platform Profile support, HDD temperature reporting, and other features working for those HP gaming laptops.

- NVIDIA's new driver preparations for future laptops with EC-driven backlights.

- The Intel ISH ECLite driver for using EC-like IP for the battery, thermal, UCSI data and more from the platform for systems lacking a discrete EC.

- AMD PMC S0ix improvements for the idle standby power states... This follows ongoing work by AMD this year for improving their s0ix handlinggood suspend-to-idle handling.

- Support for the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio and initial Microsoft Surface Pro 8 support.

The full list of patches via this PR since merged to mainline.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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