Sony PlayStation 5 DualSense Controller Driver Coming To Linux 5.12

For as rough of a year as 2020 was, one of the many open-source accomplishments was Sony taking up "official" maintenance of their HID driver and ahead of Christmas to much surprise they published an official PlayStation 5 DualSense open-source controller driver for Linux. That PS5 controller driver is now set to be introduced with the imminent Linux 5.12 merge window.

That PlayStation 5 DualSense controller driver was initially published back in December, just days ahead of Christmas and fully open-source. The driver supports the PS5 controllers via USB and Bluetooth and supports nearly all of the functionality including extras like LEDs, motion sensors, battery reporting, light-bar control, rumble, etc.

This wasn't a one-time code drop from Sony but they have committed to maintaining this open-source driver and pursued its upstreaming to the mainline Linux kernel.

Now with the Linux 5.12 kernel merge window expected to open up next week (unless it ends up being delayed by one week if a 5.11-rc8 is warranted), the HID-PlayStation driver was queued yesterday into HID-Next.

The hid-playstation driver in its current form amounts to just over 1,500 lines of new code and gets the new PlayStation 5 DualSense controllers working well for Linux gaming and similarly if/when this driver gets picked up by the likes of Android devices.

The driver is in this tree for now if wanting to make use of a PS5 DualSense controller today on Linux without waiting the few days until it has reached the mainline tree.