Linux Still Being Ported To The Synopsys ARC CPU

The Linux kernel is still being ported to new hardware. One of the latest processor families that has been receiving a Linux kernel port is the Synopsys ARC700 series.

Back in early November I wrote about the initial port of the Linux kernel for the Synopsys ARC processors. Synopsys was focusing upon bringing the Linux kernel to the ARC750D and ARC770D CPUs in particular. The Synopsys ARC750D and ARC770D processors are 32-bit RISC cores embedded in SoCs and in turn found in many consumer electronic devices from TV set-top boxes to media players. The ARC700 series supports MMU with optional DSP and FPU capabilities.

To go with the ported kernel is a toolchain based upon GCC 4.4 with uclibc and other build tools ported to this RISC processor family.

With the "v2" patches of the Synopsys ARC Linux Kernel Port that were published on Friday morning, all feedback from the original patches were addressed, working on some bigger ticket items like Device Tree and Multi-Platform-Image support, and is considered "the complete port." However, there's still some outstanding items left before upstreaming the CPU support code, which Synopsys is still pursuing for the mainline kernel.

The set of 76 v2 patches for the Synopsys ARC700 series can be found on the kernel mailing list. If all things get shaked out in the coming weeks, it's possible we could see this new processor support merged for the Linux 3.9 kernel.