ARM-Powered Lenovo Yoga C630 Laptop To See Better Support With Linux 5.4

For those excited by the prospects of running Linux on Arm-based laptops, with the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel will be better mainline support for the Lenovo Yoga C630 laptop.

Namely since earlier this year we've seen more out-of-tree Linux work for HP/ASUS/Lenovo ARM laptops. But now queued ahead of the Linux 5.4 kernel is adding the DeviceTree additions for Yoga C630 support.

The Yoga C630 is a ~$700 USD 13-inch laptop/tablet built around the Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 SoC and is backed by 8GB of RAM and a 128GB+ SSD depending upon model.

Queued as part of the arm-soc changes for Linux 5.4 is the DT addition for the C630. The contribution by Linaro notes, "Supported by this patch is: keyboard, battery monitoring, UFS storage, USB host and Bluetooth."

The state of other bits like the integrated WiFi, however, does not appear to be up to snuff at least on the mainline kernel. The out-of-tree aarch64-laptops GitHub project notes their C630 Linux support as lacking not only WiFi but Bluetooth (though this appears to be rectified for mainline), LTE, accelerated graphics (though should be possible with Freedreno), and audio.

It's nice to see the ARM-based laptop support by the mainline Linux kernel continuing to improve but still not mature enough yet for most Linux users -- especially if the long battery life (reportedly in the range of 22 hours) seen by these laptops on Windows is not carried over to Linux, thereby defeating much of the benefit to these select Snapdragon-powered laptops.