Newer Lenovo ThinkPads are adding the ability to detect and report varying degrees of hardware damage. The Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver for Linux is being adapted for being able to communicate said hardware damage to user-space Linux software.

It turns out newer ThinkPads will begin communicating detected hardware damage that can then be parsed by the OS. A new patch to Lenovo's ThinkPad ACPI open-source driver explains:

"Thinkpads are adding the ability to detect and report hardware damage status. Add new sysfs interface to identify whether hardware damage is detected or not."

Initially this support is being used around USB-C replaceable connectors to indicate if those ports are damaged.

Those interested in more details on this new Lenovo ThinkPad feature being tapped by Linux in the future with these patches can be found via the x86 platform driver mailing list .