Windows Management Instrumentation Now A Formal Bus With Linux 4.13

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) support has been worked on within Linux drivers in the past while now with Linux 4.13 WMI has been reworked into its own proper bus.

Windows Management Instrumentation is Microsoft's extensions to the Windows Driver Model for information and notification around instrumented components and is an implementation of the Web-Based Enterprise Management standard. Darren Hart, formerly of Intel and now with VMware, has converted the Linux WMI code into a proper bus and added additional information to sysfs and exposes the MOF (Managed Object Format) class. Some developers are working towards eventually allowing Microsoft's Windows Management Instrumentation interface to be exposed to user-space for management utilities.

With the platform-drivers-x86 updates for Linux 4.13, this new WMI bus architecture is introduced for Linux. Background information on this WMI work via this patch series. Those wanting to learn more about WMI can see this MSDN Microsoft page as I am not too familiar with it myself up until now.

Other x86 platform driver work for Linux 4.13 includes some Fujitsu laptop code improvements, various IdeaPad Laptop driver updates, the wmi-bmof driver for exposing the embedded binary WMI MOF meta-data, and other x86 Linux laptop work.