When it comes to (non-Apple) ARM laptops all the excitement these days is around the Qualcomm [1]Snapdragon X Elite SoC. But for those that happen to have a 5+ year old Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS laptop or come across one in a bargain bin, the Linux kernel is seeing improved support for this older ARM laptop powered by an aging Snadragon 850 SoC.

The Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS is a 2-in-1 convertible laptop powered by a Snapdragon 850 SoC, 1080p touchscreen display, 8GB of DDR4 memory, and was designed for early Windows on ARM use. With the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel, it's set to see better support thanks to adding a new driver for the laptop's embedded controller (EC).

The "lenovo-yoga-c630" driver is set to be merged for this next kernel version for supporting functionality relying on the embedded controller like power supply handling, USB Type-C port control, etc. This driver was worked on by Linaro engineers and is now being mainlined for better supporting the Linux experience on this early Windows 11 on ARM laptop.

The new driver is [2]queued within the platform-drivers-x86 Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.11 cycle kicking off in the next week or two. Back in 2019 there was some [3]early work to better support the Yoga C630 and [4]more improvements in 2022 but it has taken until midway through 2024 to see the EC driver support readied.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Snapdragon+X

[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/pdx86/platform-drivers-x86.git/commit/?h=for-next&id=5e5f2f92cccc29f356422d3cbc104f7f42430f22

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.4-Yoga-C630-Lenovo-ARM

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lenovo-Yoga-C630-Linux-EC