Acer Aspire 1 ARM Laptop Has Nearly Complete Upstream Linux Support
Acer Aspire 1 ARM Laptop Has Nearly Complete Upstream Linux Support


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.

Developer Nikita Travkin wrote in that patch series:
"The EC would be one of the last pieces to get almost full support for the Acer Aspire 1 laptop in the upstream Linux kernel."
So for those wanting to play with an ARM Linux laptop using an upstream kernel build and not really concerned about raw performance, the Acer Aspire 1 is looking like it can fit those requirements in early 2024. For those interested there are refurbished versions of the Acer Aspire 1 (A114-61) laptop still being offered via the Acer re-certified store and elsewhere for around $250 USD. The 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage may be a letdown for some though in 2024.