For helping out their Steam Controller with SteamOS, a Valve engineer along with Greg Kroah-Hartman have improved the Linux kernel's XPad driver with a series of patches that will be queued up for mainlining.

Published on Friday were the set of patches by Greg KH and Pierre-Loup A. Griffais, the former NVIDIA engineer who joined Valve to work on SteamOS.

The set of seven XPad input drivers fix-up the driver when using a wireless xpad controller to dynamically create devices when found by the controller and also is working LEDs support for the driver.

While seven patches are a nice start, the XPad driver still needs a lot more work in the areas of LED, USB, and other code.

Those interested in checking out these patches to the Linux kernel input driver to benefit Valve's Steam Controller work can find them on the Linux input mailing list. The patches will likely not be merged until at least the Linux 3.15 kernel.