Acer Inspire 1 ARM Laptop Has Nearly Complete Upstream Linux Support

Phoronix's Michael Larabel writes: With patches pending for creating an Acer Aspire 1 embedded controller driver, this Qualcomm Snapdragon powered ARM laptop has "almost full support" with the upstream Linux kernel. The Acer Aspire 1 (A114-61) is an aging ARM laptop design built on the Snapdragon 7c Gen1. It's no longer the latest and greatest with it being a two year old device, but for those wanting a low-power and long-battery-life laptop, the Acer Aspire 1 still has some potential for Linux enthusiasts.

Over the course of this year this eight-core ARM laptop has been seeing work on mainline Linux kernel support. Since Linux 6.5 much of that support has been in place while some bits remain. Sent out recently was this patch series creating an embedded controller (EC) driver for the Acer Aspire 1. This EC driver gets battery and charger monitoring working along with USB Type-C DP Alt Mode HPD monitoring, lid status detection, and some keyboard configuration. The EC functionality on the Acer Aspire 1 is implemented in ACPI but sadly ACPI cant be used to boot Linux on these Qualcomm devices -- thus leading to this new "acer-aspire1-ec" driver being created.

Funny

[war4peace]

I was curious, so I searched for it in my country. Nothing. Zero availability.
Looking outside, I see various different products under the same name, some coming with Windows 10 (!!!), but I found an interesting tidbit on postmarketos.org:

WARNING: The bootloader chain of the device is located in the same eMMC as the OS, damaging internal partition layout may make the laptop into an unrecoverable brick.

Neat. I'll pass.

Re:Funny

[caseih]

I know UEFI has had a few major security issues of late. But really, ARM laptops and general computing devices desperately need something like it. I should be able to just plugin a generic Debian or Fedora USB installer stick and go, even if the eMMC storage is completely unbootable.

The rest of my hangups with ARM devices appear to be mostly non-issue with this laptop, if they indeed have full, mainline kernel support, needing no special kernel trees. I'm really tired of kernel forks (often ill-maintained and older) and special distro forks on my ARM boards. Still waiting for mainline kernel support for the RK3588 SoC. It's very close now. But then a newer chip will come out and be popular.

The other thing Linux needs to be successful on ARM (or RISC V) in a generally-useful way is transparent support for running emulated x86 binaries, like Apple does with Rosetta. Fortunately there is a set of projects to do just that: box86 and box64. The Linux Foundation (and all of us really) should really get behind this developer and ensure he's funded. These two projects are essential for making RISC V and ARM successful for general-purpose computing, which often involves proprietary software that won't immediately be available natively on either platform.

Re:

[Bert64]

You can run x86 binaries on arm linux either through qemu, or even through rosetta as apple provides a package of that for linux too.
However there is very little need to, most linux software is open source and already portable to other architectures.

Qemu can actually do other architectures too, like sparc, power or alpha etc.

Hello? Editors?

[algaeman]

Is it that hard to cut and paste the product name from the summary to the headline?