For those with a laptop from Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer Uniwill, two new drivers are being proposed to enhance the mainline Linux kernel support for Uniwill laptops by enabling additional functionality to work under Linux.
There have been out-of-tree drivers in existence for some Uniwill laptops while now open-source developer Armin Wolf is hoping to work it through for mainlining Uniwill WMI and laptop drivers.
The proposed WMI and laptop drivers for Uniwill-manufactured laptops aim to enable batter charge limiting, RGB lightbar controls, hardware monitoring (HWMON) support, improved hotkey handling, and other keyboard-related settings.
Armin Wolf does note some shortcomings of the Uniwill laptops that make the driver handling a bit more challenging:
“The first patch introduces the uniwill-wmi driver used for handling WMI events on Uniwill devices. Due to a grave design error inside the underlying WMI firmware interface (the WMI GUID was copied from the Windows driver samples and is thus not unique) the driver cannot be autoloaded. Instead drivers using this module will load it as an module dependency.
The second patch introduces the uniwill-laptop driver that does the majority of the work. This driver talks to the embedded controller yet another WMI interface to control the various features. Sadly this WMI firmware interfaces suffers from the exact same issue (the WMI GUID is not unique) and thus a DMI whitelist has to be used for loading the driver.”
Those with a Uniwill laptop or one from another brand that was manufactured by Uniwill as the ODM can learn more about these proposed driver additions via this patch series. The code is under review but hopefully everything will work out for getting these drivers upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel.
