The GTR9 Pro ships an EgisTec EH577 fingerprint reader (1c7a:0577) that, until now, only worked with Windows Hello. I wrote an open Linux driver for it. It enrolls, verifies, and unlocks KDE on the real sensor.
Why it needed a custom driver: the sensor is tiny, 70×57 pixels. libfprint’s built-in matcher does a poor job on an image that small, and generic approaches (phase correlation, SIFT-based matching) hit a false-accept wall at that scale. So instead of matching in the open-source stack, the driver reuses EgisTec’s own matching engine, the one from their signed Windows driver, and runs it natively on Linux.
A couple of things people usually ask about:
- It runs under fprintd’s normal hardening. No disabling MemoryDenyWriteExecute, and it stays inside SELinux confinement (no execmem). You don’t have to loosen anything.
- It contains no proprietary binaries. You fetch EgisTec’s engine DLL from the Microsoft Update Catalog through the build script and the build adapts it locally, same idea as the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package. The driver code is LGPL-2.1.
Setup is one script, bash setup.sh, which clones and builds everything; uninstall is fully reversible.
Repo: github.com/OMGrant/eh577-libfprint
