Expected to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is the ASUS Armoury “asus-armoury” driver for enhancing support for the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handhelds and other ASUS enthusiast/gaming devices under Linux.
The ASUS Armoury driver was born out of the existing ASUS WMI driver but overhauling it with a clean and more well defined API. The ASUS Armoury driver provides new BIOS attributes using the fw_attributes_class while deprecating all the existing attributes from the ASUS-WMI driver with plans to then remove them in the next Linux LTS kernel version.
The new ASUS Armoury driver is explained in the patch series as:
“It is without a doubt much cleaner to use, easier to discover, and the API is well defined as opposed to the random clutter of attributes I had been placing in the platform sysfs. Given that Derek is also working on a similar approach to Lenovo in part based on my initial work I’d like to think that the overall approach is good and may become standardised for these types of things.”
The ASUS Armoury driver has been in the works the past several months and went through 17 rounds of review and revisions in coming up with this cleaned-up ASUS open-source driver for Linux gaming/enthusiast hardware.
Among the features wired up initially with the ASUS Armoury driver are for toggling the panel mode between FHD and UHD modes, adjusting the APU-allocated memory depending upon user priority, Intel core count control for P or E cores (reboot needed after making this adjustment), a screen auto brightness toggle, and other settings.
The ASUS Armoury driver patches this week were queued up within the platform-drivers-x86.git for-next branch. With the ASUS Armoury patches in that “for-next” branch, they should be submitted as part of the upcoming Linux 6.19 merge window.
