Linux 6.6 To Support Rumble / Force Feedback On Google Stadia Controllers

For those that happen to have a Google Stadia gaming controller from the days of Google's cloud gaming service, the Linux 6.6 kernel is adding a new driver to enable force feedback (rumble) support with these controllers.

As part of shutting down the Stadia game streaming service, Google made available updated firmware for enablign Bluetooth (BLE) support and USB wired connectivity so at least these gaming controllers can live on for local gaming rather than becoming e-waste. The force feedback / rumble support though doesn't work out-of-the-box on Linux but thankfully Google engineers wrote a basic driver for enabling Stadia rumble capabilities.

I've previously written about the Stadia rumble effort for Linux and this week the patches made their way to HID-next. Now that it's in the HID subsystem's "-next" branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window, this new driver is set to be mainlined.

This commit adds the "hid-google-stadiaff" driver and the HID_STADIA_FF Kconfig option for compiling this new driver. This force feedback support has been tested to work for both BLE and USB usage.