In the next round of the Linux 5.17 kernel update cycle, the development team plans to introduce a driver called x86-android-tablets to solve some problems related to tablets and defects that cannot operate normally. In recent years, Hans de Goede, a long-time Red Hat developer, has been responsible for this and other desktop-related improvements.
He said that as part of the ACPI Differential System Description Table (DSDT), many x86 tablets only have invalid entries and other problems. But when trying to run mainline Linux on the hardware mentioned, it still causes some problems. The good news is that Hans de Goede has now put his own x86-android-tablets driver into the driver tree of the x86 platform to ease the chaos of x86 (mainly Android) tablets.
He explained that as part of the current submission in the platform-drivers-x86 for-next branch, the factory image of x86 Android tablets often has various problems. Usually, the pre-installed kernel will be placed in these devices with hard-coded device addresses and GPIOs instead of specifying them in the DSDT. The differential system description table contains a random collection of equipment, but they may or may not exist.
The good news is that the upcoming new driver will only be loaded on the affected models based on DMI matching, in order to fix battery monitoring, touchpad, accelerometer not working and other issues. In this way, when building as a module, we do not need to add any additional code to the main kernel image (vmlinuz)-such as Chiwei Hi8, an Intel x86 tablet.
