Intel Begins Publishing Linux Patches For "Avoton"

Intel has begun publishing Linux kernel patches to enable hardware support for their next-generation Avoton System-on-a-Chip. Avoton will be found in future low-power Atom offerings.

Intel's Avoton is a 22nm SoC that will be released this calendar year and be the target for micro-servers. The Avoton SoCs will be part of the Intel "Edisonville" micro-server platform and each chip will have up to 4MB of L2 cache, power consumption under 20 Watts, and varying core counts/frequencies depending upon the model. Avoton SoCs will also feature Turbo Boost technology and the enterprise versions will bring ECC, Intel VT, and other high-end functionality.

On Friday, the first of the Linux kernel patches for Avoton begun to surface on the kernel mailing list. There isn't any Linux kernel support for the Intel Avoton SoC as of the Linux 3.8 kernel, but it looks like the first bits of hardware enablement will come in Linux 3.9.

The patches hitting the Linux mailing list in the past hour include ahci: AHCI-mode SATA patch for Intel Avoton DeviceIDs, i2c-i801: SMBus patch for Intel Avoton DeviceIDs, and ata_piix: IDE-mode SATA patch for Intel Avoton DeviceIDs.

Intel Avoton hardware is expected to launch at some point after the Haswell launch in the coming months. Based upon the timing of the Linux kernel support just coming and the kernel's release cycle which Intel is well aware of, I would say Avoton won't be appearing until at least mid-Q3.