Linux for the Surface Pro 11 (Snapdragon X Elite) — public beta

Experimental. For people who can use a terminal, keep backups, and recover a tablet that does not boot. Read RELEASE-STATUS.md and KNOWN-ISSUES.md before flashing anything.

This repository is the source, tooling, and documentation behind a live and installer ISO for the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 OLED with Snapdragon X Elite (microsoft,denali). On the tested unit the following work: OLED display, touch, pen (through iptsd), attached and Bluetooth Flex Keyboard and haptic touchpad, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, speakers, microphones, front/rear cameras, IR camera, volume buttons, battery charge limit, ambient colour sensor, power profiles, and suspend/resume (s2idle, with the documented CPU-idle mitigation).

Try it

1. Download the ISO from the releases page and write it to a USB stick.
2. In Windows, open the stick's SP11FW drive and run RUN-IN-WINDOWS.cmd. It copies five firmware files (audio/compute DSP, GPU) from your own Windows installation onto the stick; they cannot be shipped in the ISO.
3. Disable Secure Boot, boot the stick (Volume-Down + Power), test.
4. Optionally run Install SP11 Linux for dual boot or a full wipe.

Full walkthrough: docs/GETTING-STARTED.md. Firmware details and alternatives: docs/FIRMWARE.md. Removing it again: docs/UNINSTALL.md.

What is in the box

• Kernel 7.2.0-sp11-73beta1 (kernel/port-7.3/): the SP11 series (camera, touch, tablet mode, DP DDC, charge limit, suspend work) carried forward onto the Linux 7.3 merge window, with deep idle unrestricted (about 3.7 W less at idle, 0.5 W in suspend), native Flex Keyboard Bluetooth pairing, the half-screen tint fix and the front-camera exposure fix. Reproducible builds; see docs/BUILD.md. The maintainer's daily kernel since 2026-08-28.
• Kernel 7.1.3-sp11-suspend-review20 (kernel/): the previous beta's kernel on Linux 7.1.3, still published and buildable.
• Arch Linux ARM package set (GNOME 50, PipeWire, libcamera, NetworkManager, Rnote, Firefox, …) pinned in iso/packages.lock.tsv.
• rootfs/: the services and helpers that make the hardware behave (iptsd lifecycle, charge limit, power profiles, cpufreq boost, Bluetooth address, sensor and suspend hooks, …) and the Bluetooth pairing tools for the detached Flex Keyboard (sp11-flex-pair) and the Slim Pen 2 (sp11-pen-pair), with guided desktop entries for both, and the Plymouth boot splash (theme plus the initramfs hook that brings the display up early).
• scripts/: the Windows USB creator (SP11-USB-CREATOR.cmd), firmware collectors (sp11-collect-firmware.ps1, sp11-firmware.py), the installer (sp11-install-plan.py, sp11-install-executor.py, sp11-installer-ui.py), the live-image builder and audits, and the overlay installer for existing Arch Linux ARM systems.
• Only redistributable firmware (firmware/allowlist.tsv). No Windows driver files, traces, or private data are tracked.

Foundation and credit

The Arch Linux ARM bootstrap, firmware workflow, and early SP11 enablement come from dwhinham/linux-surface-pro-11. The kernel work incorporates GPL-licensed work from Linux contributors, Dale Whinham, Bryan O'Donoghue and Linaro, Qualcomm, and STMicroelectronics; authorship and provenance are preserved in NOTICE.md, docs/PROVENANCE.md, and docs/CAMERA-REVIEW.md. AI tools materially assisted development and validation (docs/AI-ASSISTANCE.md).

Licensing

Aggregate: the MIT licence covers the project's own scripts and documentation; kernel material keeps GPL-2.0 and per-file licences, libcamera changes LGPL/CC0, the Power Profiles Daemon patch GPL-3.0. See docs/LICENSING.md and the REUSE metadata.

Tested target

• Microsoft Surface Pro, 11th Edition, OLED, Snapdragon X Elite (X1E80100)
• One physical unit. The LCD, X Plus, 5G, and Surface Laptop variants are not supported (different hardware, not just untested); see SUPPORTED-HARDWARE.md.

Contributing and reporting

Open issues with the diagnostics report from sp11-live-firstboot-capture.sh (review it first: it contains device identifiers). Read CONTRIBUTING.md for the privacy and provenance boundary; never attach firmware packs or Windows driver files.

Microsoft and Surface are names used only to identify compatible hardware. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft, Qualcomm, Linaro, STMicroelectronics, or the Linux kernel project.