GETAC manufactures a line of rugged/semi-rugged laptops for use in the public safety, defense, industrial manufacturing, oil and gas, and other industries. While shipping with Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, a new driver has been proposed as GETAC MPMD as a minimal ACPI driver for improving support for these GETAC rugged laptops. In particular, the driver will allow the various programmable buttons on these laptops to work under Linux.

With these GETAC rugged laptops using Intel Core CPUs, the Linux support appears to be largely in order but one of the missing elements came down to the embedded controller (EC) handling for vendor button events / programmable buttons on these devices like the GETAC S410 laptop.

Open-source developer Zhan Chubukou developed the "getac-mpmd" driver to properly handle the MPMD ACPI device with hardware ID MTC0303 so the programmable buttons will be properly handled on Linux. Until now these button events would be silently dropped.

If you happen to have a GETAC rugged laptop, the new driver is out for review on the [1]platform-driver-x86 mailing list .



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/platform-driver-x86/20260715004203.14549-1-chubukou@gmail.com/