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Linux Kernel 4.8 Adds Microsoft Surface 3 Support (betanews.com)
Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews:If you are a Windows user, and want a really great computer, you should consider Microsoft's Surface line. Not only do they serve as wonderful tablets, but with the keyboard attachment, they can be solid laptops too. While many Linux users dislike Microsoft, some of them undoubtedly envy Windows hardware. While it is possible to run Linux distros on some Surface tablets, not everything will work flawlessly. Today, release candidate 1 of Linux Kernel 4.8 is announced, and it seems a particularly interesting driver has been added -- the Surface 3 touchscreen controller. "This seems to be building up to be one of the bigger releases lately, but let's see how it all ends up. The merge window has been fairly normal, although the patch itself looks somewhat unusual: over 20 percent of the patch is documentation updates, due to conversion of the drm and media documentation from docbook to the Sphinx doc format. There are other doc updates, but that's the big bulk of it," says Linus Torvalds, Linux creator. Will Microsoft's lower-priced (starting at $499) hybrid computer become the ultimate mobile Linux machine?
Everything is locked down? Weird then that they publish this. It tells you how to enable/disable Secure Boot, how to enable/disable TPM, how to boot from other devices, etc.
Wrong. They even publish how to disable secure boot an TPM.
AIUI the arm based surface tablets (surface RT and surface 2) are locked down to the hilt with forced secure boot that will only boot windows
Not quite. They will only boot Microsoft-signed bootloaders. Such as Red Hat's shim which in turn launches GRUB or what have you.
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... but Slashdot instead publishes a Microsoft advertisement, as if "Surface support" was in any way as relevant as the other big new features - read e.g. here if you want to know more. Shame on you, Slashdot!
The touchscreen hardware in the Surface 3 uses a unique undocumented interface, not just some standard synaptics or wacom setup. The protocol had to be reverse engineered so that the touchscreen could be tied to the input subsystem. Also, in response to your "who" question, Benjamin Tissoires took care of touch input, I wrote the pen support.