New AMD & Intel Laptop/Platform Support In Linux 6.8

Merged last week for the Linux 6.8 kernel were the platform driver x86 updates, which include a lot of new AMD Ryzen and Intel Core platform support and new laptop functionality.

The Linux platform-drivers-x86 space continues to be quite busy with the multitude of interesting AMD/Intel laptops coming out these days and rather interesting designs. Plus new CPU laptop and desktop features from both vendors requiring more interactions by the Linux kernel to properly support.

Along with the GPU-side patches having been merged via the DRM pull request, the platform-drivers-x86 code introduces AMD ACPI-based WiFi Brand RFI mitigation functionality. This is to deal with radio frequency interference between the WiFi and GPU clocks on newer AMD Ryzen laptops. Intel has had similar RFI mitigation support in the kernel for years while AMD WBRF is the feature in Linux 6.8 for dealing with interference between select WiFi chipsets and the GDDR/DDR video memory clocks.

Also on the AMD side is continued work on the Platform Management Framework (PMF) for new power/performance controls with new Ryzen CPUs, AMD PMC driver support for Zen 5 CPUs, and other changes.

On the Intel side there is Lunar Lake M and Arrow Lake S support added to the Intel PMC core driver, Lunar Lake M support in the Intel VSEC driver, various Intel CPUs from Kabylake to Lunar Lake being added to the intel-uncore-freq driver, and other support updates.

The platform drivers x86 updates for Linux 6.8 also add a new Silicon Platform driver, WMI driver updates, more hardware quirks in the x86 Android tablets driver, and the Acer WMI driver now supports the Acer Predator PHN16-71. See this pull for the complete list of patches.