ASUS MeMO Pad 7, Nextbook Ares 8 Seeing Better Support With Linux 5.18

Being introduced with Linux 5.18 is the new x86-android-tablets driver that is just used for dealing with quirky Intel-powered Android tablets that were designed around running custom vendor kernels for these consumer electronic devices and never the mainline Linux kernel. This x86-android-tablets driver provides workarounds/quirk handling for improving what would otherwise be a buggy experience when trying to run Linux on these devices.

The x86-android-tablets driver has been primarily focused on the range of Android tablets that have missing/inaccurate ACPI and DSDT table entries that can cause problems or in cases where the tablet was relying just on hard-coded data within the vendor kernel builds. With Linux 5.18, there is yet more additions to this catch-all driver.

Seeing a number of patches queue up for this next cycle with the x86-android-tablets driver is the ASUS MeMO Pad 7, the ME176C model. There has been patches around charger and fuel gauge properties being exposed, IRQ for the accelerometer info, lid switch event handling, and other items. The ASUS MeMO Pad 7 was launched back in 2014 for the Intel-powered model that relies on an Atom Z3745 processor and has a 7-inch IPS display.

ASUS MeMO Pad 7

The ASUS Transformer Pad (TF103C) that is a convertible tablet/notebook also benefits from some of these latest x86-android-tablets patches.

Nextbook Ares 8

Separately the x86-android-tablets driver has device data added for the Nextbook Ares 8. It's another buggy one outside of the custom Android kernels, "Its DSDT contains a bunch of I2C devices which are not actually there, causing various resource conflicts...Add support for manually instantiating the I2C devices which are actually present on this tablet by adding the necessary device info to the x86-android-tablets module." The Nextbook Ares 8 is an 8-inch Android 5.0 tablet featuring an Intel Atom Z3735G processor. The Nextbook Ares 8 was formerly available at the major retailer Walmart for around $60 USD.

The latest x86-android-tablets driver activity is queuing up within the platform-drivers-x86 for-next branch ahead of the Linux 5.18 merge window opening up in March.