A couple of weeks ago, my laptop, a 4 years old ultrabook, stopped working because of a bus problem. Instead of asking the manufacturer to fix it, I took the decision of buying a new laptop.

At the end of some research (and some misadventures with another manufacter), I opted for a HP Spectre x360 4110nl. It is a gorgeous machine.

First things, first. I disabled the safe boot and booted the Gentoo Live DVD. Everything was working  out of the box, even the touchscreen.

So I installed it from stage3, but I did not compiled my own kernel. Instead, I used genkernel. It was my first time with genkernel, I usually compile it manually.

Here is the list of hardware and the output of lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Sky Lake Host Bridge/DRAM Registers (rev 08)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Sky Lake Integrated Graphics (rev 07)
00:13.0 Non-VGA unclassified device: Intel Corporation Device 9d35 (rev 21)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Device 9d2f (rev 21)
00:14.2 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Device 9d31 (rev 21)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Device 9d3a (rev 21)
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Device 9d03 (rev 21)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9d10 (rev f1)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9d11 (rev f1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9d48 (rev 21)
00:1f.2 Memory controller: Intel Corporation Device 9d21 (rev 21)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device 9d70 (rev 21)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Device 9d23 (rev 21)
01:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5227 PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7265 (rev 61)

 Video

To correctly use the video card you need to include the firmware into the kernel. Look at the Wiki page about Intel.For this model I needed to add

CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE="i915/skl_dmc_ver1.bin i915/skl_guc_ver4.bin"
CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE_DIR="/lib64/firmware"

 Wireless

Worked out of the box. Just remember to add the wpa_supplicant service to rc.

Touchscreen

To enable to touchscreen I needed to re-compile the kernel with CONFIG_HID_MULTITOUCH.

There are still some feature missing, that I need to sort out:

• Double tap
• Auto rotation adjustment
• Disabling keyboard when in tablet mode
• OS virtual keyboard