Linux 6.12 x86 Platform Drivers Brings Improvements For Laptops Plus Intel ELC

The x86 platform driver changes that were merged last week for the Linux 6.12 kernel continue to be quite lively with changes for enhancing Linux laptop support along with other Intel platform improvements.

Among the interesting x86 platform driver updates that were merged as new feature patches for Linux 6.12 include:

- The ASUS WMI driver adds support for fan profiles with ASUS Vivobook laptops. The Vivobook treats fan/power profiles differently from the ASUS ROG laptops and thus needed special handling within the WMI vendor driver.

- The dell-laptop Linux driver allows for configuring battery charge settings. The BIOS on newer Dell laptops allow for setting custom charging modes for extended battery life. The Dell battery modes are standard, fast, trickle, adaptive, and custom.

- The lg-laptop driver has added operation region support.

- The panasonic-laptop driver for Panasonic devices has added support for programmable buttons.

- The AMD PMF driver has added support for notifying of Smart PC Solution updates.

- The ThinkPad ACPI driver adds fan control support for the Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E531.

- While part of the x86 Platform Drivers area, the Microsoft Surface platform driver has added support for Snapdragon-powered ARM64 Surface devices.

- Outside of laptops but still within the x86 platform drivers realm is Intel Efficiency Latency Control support. Intel ELC allows for fine-tuning the behavior on Xeon SoCs and similar for managing the uncore frequency.

- Also on the Intel Xeon side the Intel In-Field Scan (IFS) driver adds SBAF core testing functionality for use with Xeon 6 Granite Rapids processors.

The full list of x86 platform driver updates that were merged for Linux 6.12 can be found via this pull.