For those that happen to have the Dell G15 5530 laptop or considering this Intel Core i7 13650HX + NVIDIA GeForce RTX high-end laptop, the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is set to have AWCC platform profile support for this model as a nice enhancement. In turn this patch should also be back-ported to future stable Linux kernel point releases.

Dell/Alienware systems on Microsoft Windows have the Alienware Command Center (AWCC) for various controls for these gaming laptops. Under Linux, patches to the kernel last year [1]enabled thermal/power platform profile support built around the AWCC functionality that previously could only be controlled under Windows. The Alienware Command Center software on Linux exposes these user-selectable thermal tables for different power and performance characteristics.

Many Alienware and Dell G-Series laptops are already supported by this addition to the Linux Alienware-WMI driver while sent out today for Linux 6.18 is adding support for the Dell G15 5530 model.

The Dell G15 5530 just needed a patch adding the DMI vendor and product name information to the Alienware-WMI-WMAX driver's quirk table for properly supporting it. While being sent in today for Linux 6.18 ahead of next weekend's Linux 6.18-rc3 kernel, the patch is also marked for back-porting to supported stable kernel branches too in the coming days.

This addition was the main highlight of today's [2]pull request for the platform-drivers-x86 area of the kernel.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Dell-WMI-AWCC-Alienware

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/platform-driver-x86/pdx86-pr-20251022140349-2206824358@linux.intel.com/