The x86 platform driver updates were merged recently for the ongoing Linux 7.0 merge window. As is a common theme for platform-drivers-x86, a lot of the feature work is around Linux laptop drivers for enhancing the support on modern hardware.
Some of the x86 platform driver highlights for Linux 7.0 include:
– The AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) driver has seen various fixes as well as support for exposing AMD Ryzen AI NPU metrics to user-space and use by other drivers. The NPU metrics is read from the platform management firmware and can then be consumed by other drivers like the actual AMDXDNA accelerator driver. The Ryzen AI NPU metrics currently consist of the clock frequency, the busy state of the NPU as a percent, the NPU power use in mW, the NPU frequency, the NPU read bandwidth, and the NPU write bandwidth.
– The ASUS WMI driver has landed improved backlight control handling as well as supporting multiple interfaces for controlling keyboard and RGB brightness.
– The HP WMI driver added support for manual fan control on HP Victus S laptop models.
– The Lenovo WMI driver now exposes hardware monitoring reporting via the HWMON interfaces.
– The NVIDIA Mellanox driver prepares for upcoming HI173 and HI174 hardware with a next-gen 800GB/s Ethernet switch as well as a new NVIDIA DGX system based on class VMOD0010.
– The Uniwill driver now supports setting a custom TGP for discrete GPUs including for TUXEDO Computers laptops.
– WMI marshalling to better match Microsoft Windows’ ACPI / WMI handling.
The Linux laptops tested in the recent Intel Arc B390 Panther Lake Generational Performance Since The Gen9 Graphics Era
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More details on these platform-drivers-x86 changes via this pull.
