Surface Book and Linux

[roman.sattler]

Hi guys,

I was wondering if anybody has read or heard anything useful about the Surface Book's compatibility to Linux.

Especially the locking mechanism and support of the half-integrated GPU seems critical to me.

I do realise that this is a Microsoft device and they probably do not care about other OSs. Some people might want to run a dualboot on it anyways.

 

Thanks for your help

Roman

[ShadowCaptain]

I would imagine somebody would need to write something specific to the surface for it to work

You would be able to run linux with it attached, or detached, but I doubt the switching part works, you will probably have to fully reboot

[sirtoby]

The basics should work, the GPU part seems tricky though, as it's custom. Then you've got the issue of detaching. I'm assuming that Microsoft uses some sort of PCIe to connect the GPU to the CPU via tha hinge. This means that you would need to find a way to enable PCIe hotplugging, which I don't think is very easily

[ozziestig]

Well Tek Linux did a video on it.

[roman.sattler]

The basics should work, the GPU part seems tricky though, as it's custom. Then you've got the issue of detaching. I'm assuming that Microsoft uses some sort of PCIe to connect the GPU to the CPU via tha hinge. This means that you would need to find a way to enable PCIe hotplugging, which I don't think is very easily

 

Hotplugging a Nvidia GPU is possible through Nvidia Optimus (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-gpu-optimus,9788.html) which is part of the driver. Or at least should be.

 

It's more about the muscle-wire lock. This thing probably needs some kind of driver.

[ahkenatan]

I saw a post on reddit on the /r/Surface forum where somebody said it works fine in Linux. I can't provide you a link to the post because I saw it yesterday and I don't know how trustworthy the author is anyways; it'd be better to ask Microsoft directly or maybe open up a topic on the /r/Surface forum about it.