macbook12-spi-driver

WIP input driver for the SPI touchpad / keyboard found in the 12" MacBook (MacBook8,1 + MacBook9,1)

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329GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

WIP input driver for the SPI touchpad / keyboard found in the 12" MacBook (MacBook8,1 + MacBook9,1)

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Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:04:58 PM UTC.

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Mentions over time

HN mentions by year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-11-10 23:03:47 UTC to 2020-04-26 04:34:27 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2016	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	3
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2

What Hacker News says

2 sources

Dunedan·Nov 11, 2017

> Can I install Debian on it and have stuff working? Depends on the kind of Mac you buy. I can only comment on their mobile offerings: - Best supported are the current MacBook Airs. Everything except the Webcam should work out-of-the-box. The webcam needs the out-of-tree bcwc_pcie driver (https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie)). - The Retina MacBooks need some manual work before being usable (e.g. need to compile out-of-tree keyboard & touchpad driver (https://github.com/cb22/macbook12-spi-driver)), but should work fine as well. - The MacBook Pros before October 2016 are also quite good supported, the support for newer ones is still quite incomplete (check out https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux for details), although it's possible to use them as daily driver if you're aware of the limitations.

In “We have obtained fully functional JTAG for Intel CSME via USB DCI”

Dunedan·Sep 18, 2017

> Apple just doesn't seem to care about build quality beyond the cosmetics of their Mac lineup. A great example of this is how they have dual connections from the keyboard & trackpad to the mainboard (USB and SPI), while the UEFI and Linux have drivers to support the keyboard fully, macOS has no driver for the built-in USB connection. Well, it's complicated. In the past mobile Macs used USB to connect the input devices like most other notebooks do. At a certain point Apple decided that it would be a good idea to switch to SPI for power consumption reasons. Following that decision there were certain models which had wired both, e.g. the MacBook Pro 2015. While Apple switched already to use SPI there, Linux still used USB, as there was simply no driver support. The Retina MacBook in 2015 was the first mobile Mac which didn't support USB for

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input devices anymore. The MacBook Pro followed in late 2016. That left Linux without a working driver for the input devices. A year ago somebody started to reverse engineer the SPI protocol to get a working driver: https://github.com/cb22/macbook12-spi-driver/ The release of the SPI-only MacBook Pros end of last year sparked the further development of this driver, so it's slowly reaching a state were everything is just working (maybe except for advanced Touchpad features). That driver is still not included in any major Linux distribution, as it's still pretty experimental and also required patching the Linux kernel for quite some time, because Apple does some ACPI-related stuff different than the PC-world. Thankfully support for Apples way will land in the upcoming Linux 4.14 (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/53ac64aac9af8cd0e54...) making some code in the driver redundant (https://github.com/cb22/macbook12-spi-driver/pull/46). So I would say that whole topic isn't about not to care about build quality, but about to care about power consumption. Still having USB on some generations of Macs in addition to SPI was probably simply to ease the migration by unbundling the hardware changes from the software changes.

In Thinkpad X62