The good news is that with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle, the ARM-based Acer Aspire One laptop will have “almost full” support for this Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered laptop. The downside, though, is that it’s now a three-year-old device with far more interesting ARM laptops on the market and more powerful options coming to market this year.

For some time now, open source developers/enthusiasts have been working on Linux support for the 2021-launched Acer Aspire One featuring an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c SoC. The base SKU only has 4GB of system memory and 64GB of eMMC storage while sporting a 14-inch display.

Most of the Acer Aspire One Linux support has been upgraded over the past year, but EC driver support is needed for “near full support” for this notebook. Getting the onboard controller to work well was one of the last remaining pieces for a good Linux experience with this Acer ARM laptop.

That Acer Aspire One embedded controller driver is set for the previous cycle for the Linux 6.10 kernel cycle. The EC driver is required for battery/charger monitoring, USB Type-C DP Alt Mode HPD, cover status detection, some keyboard configurations, and related EC functions. EC support required a custom driver that went through months of review and revisions.

This Acer Aspire One driver was recently queued to the platform-drivers-x86 for-next branch confirming that it is intended for submission during the Linux 6.10 merge window next month. The nearly 600-line driver plus associated DeviceTree code is ready for Linux 6.10.