The Intel/AMD Laptop & Tablet Support Improvements For Linux 5.17

The x86 platform drivers area of the kernel remains very active in recent times thanks to the continued investments by Red Hat as well as growing IHV interest from the likes of Lenovo while also still having many contributions flow in from the likes of AMD and Intel. With Linux 5.17 are a number of driver additions and improvements for benefiting various x86 laptops and tablets.

Red Hat's Hans de Goede sent in the platform-drivers-x86 changes today for the newly-opened Linux 5.17 merge window includes:

- The previously covered fix for AMD s2idle failures on various Ryzen laptops! The simple fix should help improve the suspend-to-idle handling for different Ryzen-powered laptops.

- The new x86 Android Tablets driver that is just about quirks and workarounds for various buggy x86 Android tablets that sadly is all too common. This driver just carries workarounds to appky based on DMI matching for tablets with missing/broken ACPI tablets and other issues that prevent the hardware from working well with the mainline Linux kernel as from the factory they shipped with Android Linux kernel builds carrying various hard-coded values. There are several different ASUS Android tablets and other devices part of this initial driver introduction, more details in the aforelinked articles.

- One of the new drivers is the "lenovo-yogabook-wmi" driver for better support for Lenovo Yoga Book devices. This is used for the keyboard backlight control, "pen" key, and related functionality.

- Support for setting custom fan curves on various modern ASUS ROG laptops.

- The Lenovo ThinkPad driver now supports force discharge and inhibit charge functionality.

- AMD Smart Trace Buffer (STB) support is added to the AMD PMC driver. The AMDGPU driver also has STB support ready.

- A new driver for the ASUS TF103C dock for handling of the keyboard/touchpad/USB port on this 2-in-1 tablet.

- A new "intel_crystal_cove_charger" driver as one of the many additions by Hans de Goede. This is for dealing with IRQ pass-through for Intel Bay Trail "Crystal Cove" PMIC hardware.

- Continued Intel IPU3/SkyCam camera support improvements as well as adding the board data for the Microsoft Surface Go.

See this PR for the full list of x86 platform driver changes with Linux 5.17. Great work especially to Red Hat's Hans de Goede for all the improvements he has been driving into Linux laptop/tablet support enhancements.

This pull (and article) is just about the platform-drivers-x86 changes while outside of that area there are also many other Linux 5.17 improvements that will also benefit laptop users like the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver and other changes, so stay tuned to Phoronix for the latest kernel PRs followed by my usual benchmarking...