NVIDIA SHIELD Controller Driver Coming With Linux 6.5

Five years after NVIDIA launched their SHIELD "Thunderstrike" gaming controller, they've recently been working on upstreaming support for this controller -- and other possible NVIDIA Shield peripherals -- via a new Linux kernel driver. This new driver is now set to be merged for Linux 6.5.

As written about back in April, NVIDIA has been working on a new driver that's since been renamed from "hid-shield" to "hid-nvidia-shield" for supporting their SHIELD gaming controller that launched back in 2017 while the patches also mention support for other NVIDIA SHIELD peripherals could come in the future.

Short of NVIDIA preparing to launch a next-generation SHIELD and wanting to build new Linux support off of this driver, it's not clear why they are investing now in this new driver code five years later.

The fourth iteration of the NVIDIA SHIELD HID driver was posted this week. The current capabilities for this gaming controller driver include haptics support and information querying via sysfs for the serial number / hardware information / firmware version. The v4 patch fixes some code formatting issues and makes more clear in the Kconfig text that this is for NVIDIA devices.

Following the v4 patch being posted, HID subsystem maintainer Jiri Kosina of SUSE has queued up this new driver in HID-next for submitting during the upcoming Linux 6.5 merge window. Thus in a few months when the Linux 6.5 kernel is out as stable, this new NVIDIA driver should be in place.