About this fork: linux-cachyos-surface

This fork adds a CachyOS kernel packaging on top of upstream linux-surface — see pkg/linux-cachyos-surface/PKGBUILD. It builds whatever kernel version upstream linux-surface (below) currently has official patches for, as a normal Arch/CachyOS pacman package, instead of a distro kernel with the patches applied out-of-tree.

Want the newest CachyOS kernel instead, even before linux-surface officially supports it? Use the sibling package: linux-cachyos-surface-latest.

What it's for: running a CachyOS kernel (EEVDF/BORE scheduler, LTO, BBR3, and CachyOS's other tuning) with Surface hardware support, kept up to date automatically as part of your normal system upgrades — rather than manually tracking/rebuilding a Surface kernel by hand.

How to use it:

Precompiled packages (easiest — no local kernel build): builds of this package (and its sibling) are published as a signed pacman repository served from GitHub Releases. One-time setup — first trust the signing key:

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Steefzar/linux-cachyos-surface/master/pkg/keys/surface-cachyos.asc \
    | sudo pacman-key --add -
sudo pacman-key --finger F43A86B2BAA715242965C241222C2A1B58F14BA7
sudo pacman-key --lsign-key F43A86B2BAA715242965C241222C2A1B58F14BA7

Then add the repository to /etc/pacman.conf:

[surface-cachyos]
Server = https://github.com/Steefzar/surface-kernel-autoupdate/releases/download/repo

And install:

sudo pacman -Syu linux-cachyos-surface linux-cachyos-surface-headers

Build it yourself, auto-updated: use the installer at Steefzar/surface-kernel-autoupdate, which sets up a local pacman repo and auto-builds/updates this package (and its sibling linux-cachyos-surface-latest, which tracks the newest CachyOS release instead of waiting for upstream patches) as part of your yay runs.

Fully manual: makepkg inside pkg/linux-cachyos-surface/ like any PKGBUILD.

This package builds on two upstreams: the CachyOS kernel provides the base (its patches ship pre-applied in the source tarball), and linux-surface (below) provides the Surface hardware patches applied on top.

Credits

• linux-surface/linux-surface (GPL-2.0) — all the Surface hardware-enablement patches this kernel is built from originate there; this repo is a fork of theirs and tracks their patches directly.
• CachyOS/linux and CachyOS/linux-cachyos — the CachyOS kernel base (EEVDF/BORE scheduler, BBR3, LTO and other CachyOS tuning) this build starts from, and the packaging conventions this PKGBUILD is adapted from.

This packaging was set up, is maintained, and is periodically re-synced with Claude Code (Anthropic) assistance, at the direction of and reviewed by the repository owner. Commits made with Claude's help are marked Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>.

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About upstream: linux-surface

Everything outside pkg/ in this repository is the work of linux-surface/linux-surface, the project that maintains the kernel patches making Surface hardware work on Linux (the Surface Aggregator Module, keyboard/touchpad, touch/pen input, cameras, and more) — this repo is a fork of theirs with packaging added on top.

• Is your device supported? See their supported devices & feature matrix.
• Hardware tips (disk encryption, hibernation, TLP caveats, extra tweaks in contrib/): the linux-surface wiki.
• Support: problems with this package or its builds — open an issue here. Hardware and patch questions — upstream's Matrix space; please don't report issues from this unofficial build there unless you can reproduce them on an official linux-surface kernel.

License

This repository contains patches, which are either derivative work targeting a specific already licensed source, i.e. parts of the Linux kernel, or introduce new parts to the Linux kernel. These patches fall thus, if not explicitly stated otherwise, under the license of the source they are targeting, or if they introduce new code, the license they explicitly specify inside of the patch. Please refer to the specific patch and source in question for further information. License texts can be obtained at https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/LICENSES.