Linux 5.17 To Introduce A New Driver Just To Deal With Buggy x86 Tablets

Phoronix reports:

The Linux 5.17 kernel when it kicks off next month is slated to introduce a new driver 'x86-android-tablets' just for dealing with all the quirky/buggy x86 tablets out there.
Longtime Linux developer Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been responsible for numerous x86 laptop/tablet improvements in recent years along with other desktop-related improvements at Red Hat. He has now queued up into the x86 platform drivers tree the x86-android-tablets driver he wrote for dealing with the mess of x86 (mostly Android) tablets that don't behave properly out-of-the-box with Linux.

As part of the ACPI DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table), many x86 tablets have simply invalid entries and other problems that cause issue when trying to run mainline Linux on said hardware. Hans explains as part of the commit currently in the platform-drivers-x86 'for-next' branch....

'This driver, which loads only on affected models based on DMI matching, adds DMI based instantiating of kernel devices for devices which are missing from the DSDT, fixing e.g. battery monitoring, touchpads and/or accelerometers not working.'

This new x86-android-tablets driver will basically be a catch-all solution for overrides based on device matching. Hans ended the patch message with, 'This is the least ugly option to get these devices to fully work and to do so without adding any extra code to the main kernel image (vmlinuz) when built as a module.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.