Merged for Linux 6.14 at the beginning of the year were the Intel THC drivers for supporting the Touch Host Controller IP found in modern Intel Core Ultra laptops for dealing with the touchpad, touchscreen, and related touch-control functionality. This open-source driver is still being built-out ahead of next-generation Core Ultra laptops hitting the market.
The latest major feature being worked on for making use of capabilities found within the latest Intel laptops with THC is supporting Wake-on-Touch for waking the system via touch events. The Intel THC Linux driver patches sume up Wake-on-Touch as:
“Wake-on-Touch (WoT) feature gives system the capability to wake from sleep state by user touch event, it requires platform providing wake GPIO through ACPI resource.
Intel UEFI provides a user setting to enable or disable THC device WoT feature. If it’s enabled, UEFI assigns an additional wake GPIO resource to THC device ACPI configuration, facilitating system wakeup.”
The Intel Wake-on-Touch patches with the THC code have been queued up ahead of the Linux 6.17 cycle and enable WoT functionality for both the THC i2c and SPI interfaces.
In addition to enabling Wake-on-Touch support for Intel systems, another patch adds two new THC features specific to upcoming Panther Lake hardware. Those new features are for configuring the input interrupt delay and input maximum input size control.
The patches are queued into the hid.git for-next branch and thus expected to be merged for the Linux 6.17 kernel later this year.