Intel has confirmed that will not offer support for Linux in their Intel Clover Trail Atom chips, of which several have been demonstrations in several notebooks during the Intel Developers Forum 2012 event being held these days.

The new Atom family microprocessors Intel Clover Trail have several improvements such as various power consumption modes, but Intel has indicated that it is oriented chips Windows 8. Clover Trail inherits many of the features of the Atom family of Medfield, curiously yes they are compatible with Android, but Intel seems to have decided to put an artificial barrier to try to support the most of Microsoft and its Windows 8 operating system, which is about to occur.

However, although it is likely that Intel does not provide official support themselves appear independent developers succeed in making Linux run on these platforms. Intel did not detail the technical reasons why Linux will not be supported in Intel Clover Trail, stating only that “there is a lot of work in the software section to make a chip is supported on a particular operating system.”

Maybe one of the features that are difficult to implement for Linux is supported by the new P and C states of energy consumption, which can completely stop any of the cores on the chip to save power, and Intel as the operating system needs provide “clues” to the processor to make use of those states, and apparently that information cannot be provided by Linux to this day.

We’ll see if they finally appear unofficial ways of supporting these chips, although Intel’s decision is at least disappointing, especially for a company that traditionally has been heavily involved in the evolution of the Linux kernel. But now as per the new, Intel Clover Trail will not support Linux, let’s wait and watch what will be the final result.