Apple Silicon Linux Driver Adapted To Help Older Intel-Powered Macs

The Linux kernel's "macsmc" driver was developed for supporting the system management controller (SMC) on Apple Silicon Macs for supporting the light sensor, fan control, and other sensors. That macsmc driver now is seeing work to extend it for better supporting older Intel-powered Macs. The Linux kernel has the "applesmc" driver for supporting older Intel Macs but that driver is in an awkward state with being a large monolithic mess. Open-source developer Atharva Tiwari thus took to extending the modern macsmc driver to work with Intel Macs in place of applesmc. It ends up being possible as the SMC between the Intel and Apple Silicon Macs is quite similar except for the SMC communication interface: "applesmc is very old, and all of its code is lumped into one driver. Fan control, sensors, the light sensor, the motion sensor and the keyboard backlight in a single file with its own way of talking to the SMC. It is hard to extend and to support new machines. This series adds Intel Mac support to the macsmc drivers that were written for Apple Silicon (the Asahi implementation). The SMC works the same way on both platforms, so we share a lot of code with Asahi. Only the way of talking to the SMC differs." Sent out on Thursday was this RFC patch series for extending the macsmc for supporting older Intel-powered Apple devices as a replacement to applesmc. The code is currently undergoing review but potentially good news for those still using Intel-powered Macs on Linux.