For those interested in making use of Linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops that have been appearing since earlier this year, there’s a new embedded controller (EC) driver posted for the Linux kernel for this EC that’s found on most of the X1 laptop models.
This week Maya Matuszczyk posted the set of patches for this proposed qcom-x1e-it8987 for enabling the IT8987 EC used by most of the current Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 laptops. Maya explained in the patch series:
“Currently it features only reporting that the AP is going to suspend, which results in keyboard backlight turning off and the power LED slowly blinking on the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x.
Honor Magicbook Art 14 and Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x are known to have firmware with extensions which would need appropriate handling. For reverse engineering the firmware on them I have written a Rust utility.”
So the functionality is just the start and more models will need further work, but an important step forward given the tasks these days assigned to laptop embedded controllers.
The Rust reverse engineering tool also has some notes about differences in some of the laptop models:
– Lenovo Yoga Slim7x and Honor Magicbook Art 14 seem to have a somewhat-compatible firmware with random extensions
– Microsoft Surface laptops have a completely different firmware
– ThinkPad T14s also has the classic H8 EC found in x86 ThinkPads
The patches for this IT8987 EC driver for Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 (X1E80100) laptops can be found for review on the Linux kernel mailing list.
