We’re closing in on the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release likely in little more than one week (30 November barring any delays) and today’s batch of x86 platform driver updates is bringing some new hardware support as well as some notable consumer device fixes/improvements.
The x86 platform driver co-maintainer Ilpo Järvinen of Intel sent out today’s batch of “fixes” material for the Linux 6.18 cycle.
New hardware support in this pull includes adding support for the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally gaming handheld to the AMD PMC driver for the platform management controller. This was motivated for adding the “spurious_8042” quirk for dealing with spurious interrupts during resume on this Windows-focused gaming handheld.
Also on the gaming handheld front with the AMD PMC driver is adding a quirk for the Lenovo Legion Go 2 to deal with an NVMe storage issue on resume.
Other new hardware support in this x86-platform-drivers pull is adding support to the Alienware WMI WMAX driver for the Alienware 16 Aurora, Alienware M, Alienware X, and Dell G series devices.
The HP WMI driver meanwhile added support for fan controls to the Omen 16-wf1xxx and fan / thermal profile support for the Omen MAX 16-ah0xx and Victus 16-r0 and 16-s0 laptops.
There is also some new activity on the Intel driver side with the HID code adding support for upcoming Nova Lake hardware. Additionally, the intel uncore driver (intel-uncore-freq) adds support for Panther Lake, Wildcat Lake, and Nova Lake. With this new hardware support amounting to new device IDs, it’s okay for merging late into the kernel cycle rather than waiting until the next merge window as it doesn’t present the risk of regressing existing hardware support.
More details on these x86 platform driver changes via this pull request.
