Linux 6.16 Brings Many Laptop Driver Improvements, New Dasharo ACPI Driver

The wide assortment of x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel due out as stable in July. As is usually the case, there are a number of Intel and AMD platform updates along with a wide assortment of driver improvements primarily for laptops from the major OEMs/ODMs.

The Alienware WMI driver has added hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem integration, support for manual fan controls on compatible Alienware laptops, and also "custom" thermal profile support.

The ASUS WMI driver meanwhile has improved the ASUS ROG Ally handheld suspend-and-resume support to work better with these gaming devices on older versions of the ASUS system firmware. The ASUS driver is also now able to warn users over old versions of the ROG Ally MCU firmware.

Also on the gaming handheld side are improvements to the OneXPlayer driver with now supporting OneXFly variants. The OneXPlayer driver also now supports charge limits / charge thresholds and turbo LED controls

Meanwhile the Dell DDV driver is now exposing battery health and manufacturing data to user-space. THe Dell PC driver has also been hooked up to the Linux kernel's faux bus and improved error propagation.

Over for the ThinkPad ACPI driver is supporting the camera shutter switch hotkey.

A new driver to the Linux 6.16 kernel x86 platform driver area is the Dasharo ACPI driver. This Dasharo driver enables fan and temperature monitoring for those using this downstream version of Coreboot from consulting firm 3mdeb.

The AMD HSMP driver meanwhile adds sysfs files for showing HSMP telemtry information. AMD HSMP as a reminder is one of their system management drivers for EPYC CPUs. Also on the AMD side is adding an AMD image signal processor (ISP) platform configuration for the OV05C10.

Over on the Intel side, the Intel Speed Select Technology driver added support for SST-TF v2 and SST-PP v2. Intel SST-TF plays an important role with the newest Intel Xeon 6 CPU models. The Intel PMC driver has split some of its code into a separate Intel SSRAM Telemetry driver. The SSRAM Telemetry driver can be enabled via the new INTEL_PMC_SSRAM_TELEMETRY Kconfig switch.

The NVIDIA Mellanox platform drivers have added support for the SN2201, SN4280, SN5610, and SN5640 hardware.

More details on the many platform driver x86 updates via this pull request that has already been merged to Linux 6.16 Git.