More Laptop Quirks Queued For Linux 4.19

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 8 August 2018 at 12:25 PM EDT. 7 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
The x86 platform drivers area of the Linux kernel is ready for the 4.19 kernel cycle to get underway next week.

With linux-platform-drivers-x86 it's largely drivers for handling different behavior on various x86 laptops/tablets. Like most cycles, much of the changes are just about handling quirks for new devices. Among the x86 platform driver updates queued in its "-next" tree for Linux 4.19 includes:

- Support for the calculator hotkey on various Lenovo systems.

- Fixed handling for Toshiba "Type 2" second-generation keyboard backlights. Up until now if the keyboard LED backlight state was changed via the hardware/firmware, Linux would get confused when user-space was trying to toggle the backlight state on these newer laptop keyboards.

- Keyboard backlight toggling support for some newer ASUS laptops like the UX550GE where the hotkey doesn't just turn the backlight on/off but through different brightness levels.

- Support for Device Specific Methods within the Intel HID driver.

- The ASUS-Wireless driver can now toggle the airplane mode LED on relevant laptops when toggling the airplane mode state.

- Dock/tablet mode detection for the Intel Virtual Button "vbtn" driver.

- Touchscreen DMI updates mostly for random low-end/off-brand tablets.

- Various Mellanox platform updates.

The currently staged changes can be found here.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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