Linux Surface Control

Control various aspects of Microsoft Surface devices on Linux from the Command-Line. Aims to provide a unified front-end to the various sysfs-attributes and special devices.

Usage

USAGE:
    surface [FLAGS] <SUBCOMMAND>

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -q, --quiet      Keep output quiet
    -V, --version    Prints version information

SUBCOMMANDS:
    dgpu           Control the discrete GPU
    dtx            Control the latch/dtx-system on the Surface Book 2
    help           Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
    performance    Control or query the current performance-mode
    profile        Control or query the current platform profile
    status         Show an overview of the current system status

See surface <subcommand> help for more details.

Hint: You can specify the subcommand by any unabiguous prefix of it, i.e. surface perf and surface p will both evaluate to surface performance.

Prequisites

For this tool to work, you need a recent version of the surface-sam module e.g. via the linux-surface kernel.

Installing

Have a look at the releases page. Pre-built packages are available for Debian (Ubuntu, ...), whereas PKGBUILDs for Arch Linux are in the AUR (surface-control).

Hint: Add the following udev rule to change performance mode as a normal user

KERNEL=="01:03:01:00:01", SUBSYSTEM=="surface_aggregator", RUN+="/usr/bin/chmod 666 /sys/bus/surface_aggregator/devices/01:03:01:00:01/perf_mode"

Building from Source

Building this application from source follows the standard rust procedure, i.e. simply call cargo build --release --locked for a release-ready executable. Completion files are automatically generated and can be found in the corresponding target/release/build/surface-<hash>/out/ directory.

Arch Linux

Simply install surface-control from AUR or have a look at its PKGBUILD.

Debian-based Distributions (Ubuntu, ...)

Generating a Debian package can be done via cargo deb. Specifically, you need to run

env CARGO_TARGET_DIR=target CARGO_INCREMENTAL=0 cargo deb

where setting CARGO_TARGET_DIR is required to output the generated auto-completion files at the correct location for cargo-deb to pick up.

The final package can be found in target/debian.