For those making use of the Intel-powered Apple MacBook Pro laptops featuring the Touch Bar, better support for that interface is slated to land with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle.
Queued up this past week within the HID subsystem’s “hid-next” Git branch are new drivers for backlight controls of Apple Touch Bars as well as a second driver used for engaging the keyboard mode of the Apple Touch Bars. With these patches queued in “hid-next”, they are set to be submitted for the Linux 6.15 merge window in March barring any last minute issues like code problems being reported.
The backlight driver allows for controlling the Apple Touch Bar brightness on x86 Macs for those models with the T2 chip. Improving the Apple Touch Bar support on Linux has been a long time coming with various out-of-tree drivers and patch efforts over the years.
The hid-appletb-kbd driver addition is for engaging the keyboard mode on Apple Touch Bars. That driver patch by Kerem Karabay explains:
“The Touch Bars found on x86 Macs support two USB configurations: one where the device presents itself as a HID keyboard and can display predefined sets of keys, and one where the operating system has full control over what is displayed. This commit adds a driver for the display functionality of the first configuration.
Note that currently only T2 Macs are supported.”
Those two new “appletb” drivers are queued in HID-next. There were also follow-up patches queued for automatic brightness control while using the Touch Bar and support for the Fn toggle between the media and function mode.
Separately, queued up last week on the Apple side for HID-next was also a patch enabling support for the Apple Magic Keyboard A3203 USB-C model for the Linux kernel to properly use the hid-apple driver.
