GTR9 Pro fingerprint reader now works on Linux (open driver)

OMGrant · 2026-07-16T03:16:55+00:00

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

Achimd1

Hi Ian,
I tried Step 1 and get this:

❯ sudo pacman -Rns libfprint [sudo]
Password for achimd:
Dependencies are being checked…
Error: Operation could not be prepared (Cannot fulfill dependencies)
:: Removing libfprint violates dependency »libfprint«, required by fprintd
:: Removing libfprint violates dependency »libfprint-2.so=2-64«, required by fprintd
~ ❯

Maybe i have to use this: sudo pacman -Rcns libfprint ?

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