Linux 6.1 Adds Support For The Microsoft Surface Pro 9

This week's batch of platform-drivers-x86 "fixes" for the ongoing Linux 6.1 kernel is a bit more notable than usual. In particular, the Surface Pro 9 and Surface Laptop 5 devices are now supported along with some other hardware support enablement.

The Surface Pro 9 is Microsoft's latest 2-in-1 tablet computer just released a few weeks ago. While shipping with Windows 11 22H2 by default, Linux 6.1 brings initial support for it.

The necessary device IDs have now been merged into Linux 6.1 so that the battery and charger status is enabled, the ACPI platform profile control, and the HID devices. The HID device support includes working touchpad, keyboard, sensors, and other devices on the Surface Pro 9. Having working touchpad and keyboard support is obviously very important and a blocker otherwise for normal Linux use. As it's just new IDs being added to existing Microsoft Surface Linux driver code, it was safe to add during the current v6.1 merge window.

Microsoft Surface Pro 9

Similarly, new IDs were also added for the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5. This support comes thanks to the great work of Maximilian Luz in continuing to improve Microsoft Surface hardware support on Linux.

Other platform-drivers-x86 patches merged this week include enabling an s2idle quirk in the Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver for the 21A1 machine type and adding a new ACPI ID of "AMDI0009" for an upcoming AMD platform in the PMC driver. No details on what that AMD platform will match to.

This work now merged for Linux 6.1 can be found via this pull.