Love ASUS hardware and their ASUS ROG tech? Well it seems Linux Kernel 5.11 will be pulling in some better support for their keyboards.
Developer Luke Jones messaged us about their work a while ago, which we talked a little about here. It's all unofficial, and done by community developers since ASUS won't do it themselves. Jones mentioned there is now a newer set of projects up on GitLab to cover most of it, and parts of it are slowly getting upstreamed into the actual Linux Kernel properly.
With a new patch being sent into the Linux Kernel git, which adds in proper support for the ASUS N-Key keyboard. It appears they use the same productId of "0x1866" across almost all of their modern gaming laptops, so support with this patch should be quite wide. The proposed patch enables "Fn+key hotkeys, keyboard backlight brightness control" and does some adjustments to the initialisation of it all to make it work nicely.
Jones also mentioned to us that various contributors are "also working on sound fixes for some of these latops, such as G14 and G15. Though time is slim, and the work hard. GX502 had sound fixes for audio jacks merged a while ago.".
Nice to see one less hassle taken away for users trying to use Linux on ASUS hardware. Every little issue adds up.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
slaapliedje Nov 5, 2020
Quoting: Luke_NukemYeah, I know. It's kind of disgusting. Especially as how I've been reading that Linux kernel development model is so much simpler and straight forward than Windows driver development.Quoting: slaapliedjeThis just reminds me of all the talks about Windows switching kernels to use Linux. How many little weird things out there like RGB lighting or special features require Windows applications (not even talking drivers here) to configure all the features that wod never work with different kernel drivers?
So much of this stuff would be trivial for the actual vendors to implement rather than community members trying to reverse engineer stuff. Gettign the backlight for these keyboards working was as simple as possible, all the work was already done at the kernel level and only the init sequence and a struct was needed. Same for the extra fn-keys. So trivial it was annoying because ASUS could have bloody well done it in an hour or less.
The same can be said about the per-key RGB stuff. I painstakingly used wireshark and ASUS Armory Crate to set each individual key and capture the packet, then create a spreadsheet of how it all works. ASUS could have released an OSS lib for this, or even just a document.
Do you know how long it would take ASUS to fix sound for all these laptops? They have the specs, all the kernel framework is laid out bare and ready, it would take maybe 15 minutes per laptop with the spec handy. Instead we have to fart about with trying to divine the secrets of the inner working by trial and fire.
Not much vendor love for the Penguin. Though after watching an older interview with the System76 guys, I'm convinced I'll only ever buy laptops or prebuilt systems from them from here on out.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me