Linux Sees Driver Finally For Lighting Up The LEDs With Whiskey Cove PMIC

One bit of Intel consumer hardware support not currently handled by the Linux kernel was for their Cherry Trail Whiskey Cove PMIC LEDs -- that's for the LEDs connected to their power-management IC on various laptops.

The Linux kernel has already supported the Whiskey Cove PMIC on Intel Cherry Trail (and the since cancelled Broxton) for GPIO, thermal, charger, and other power management features handled by this IC. But for any attached LEDs to this chip there hasn't been any support.

Of course with Intel having shifted course as well as cancelling the Broxton successor to Cherry Trail, this PMIC LED support hasn't been a priority but now an independent Linux developer has decided to tackle it. The Cherry Trail PMIC is used by various notebooks / low-power-devices with Atom x5/x7 from prior years.

A new driver was posted this weekend for getting those LEDs representing the charger as well as general-purpose LEDs working. With the less than three hundred lines of code, it's enough to get the connected LEDs lit up on the likes of the Lenovo Yoga Book notebook.