Stadia Controller Rumbles & New Gaming Peripherals Supported By Linux 6.6

There are new and improved gaming controller and peripheral support to find with the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel.

First and foremost, Linux 6.6 adds a new driver from Google that enables rumble / force feedback support for Google Stadia controllers. While the Google Stadia cloud game streaming service has been shutdown, the Stadia controllers remain available and are popular with some for using via Bluetooth or USB wired connections. With Linux 6.6 there is now this new "hid-google-stadiaff" driver that is needed to enable working rumble support under Linux.

In Linux 6.6, the HID SteelSeries driver has been extended from originally supporting just the SRW-S1 steering wheel to now also handling the Arctis 1 Xbox headset. The hid-steelseries driver will now export battery information from the headset and relay the wireless status property. The Arctis 1 is a gaming headset that retails for ~$60 USD.

The logitech-hidpp driver has added support for the Logitech MX Anywhere 3 mouse via Bluetooth with this HID++ driver for supporting high resolution scrolling. The Logitech G Pro X Superlight Gaming mouse via USB has also been added to the HID++ driver.

Linux 6.5 brought the NVIDIA SHIELD controller driver and with Linux 6.6 that NVIDIA controller driver adds battery reporting support.

With the HID updates in Linux 6.6 is also support for multi-function sensor devices with the hid-sensor-hub driver. The Lenovo Yoga C630 for example has a combined keyboard and accelerometer that to date under Linux has only allowed one or the other to work. With this change both the accelerometer and keyboard are now working on the Yoga C630 and this generic one-line change may help out other multi-function devices too.

More details on all of the HID subsystem changes for Linux 6.6 via this pull request that has already been merged to mainline.