Cavium OCTEON Driver Support For Linux Is Coming Back From The Dead

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Cavium OCTEON Driver Support For Linux Is Coming Back From The Dead

It looks like the Cavium/Marvell OCTEON MIPS-based processor support is being restored for Linux systems after some of its drivers were briefly removed...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OCTEON-Linux-Coming-Back

[tildearrow]

Typo:

We'll see if Cavium/Marvell ends up steping to the plate

[tuxd3v]

This is good news for mips

[edwaleni]

I guess that tells you how close Cavium is to the status of their stuff. When a Dev has to go beg them to pay attention.

[rekrek]

I was looking at one point to get a octeon firewall and convert it to linux as a project. It's sad to see compagnies abandon thing and it lowers thrust in them. They are all in on ARM right now, but how can a customer not expect them to drop it for powerpc/risc-v in a few years. That's especially scary for partners that develops products line base on their chips. Even if migration path are available, the team will lose all investment made on platform specific tooling.

[CommunityMember]

Most of the manufacturers using linux on cavium octeon mips hardware (an arguably good choice for networking devices) seemed to have used cavium's SDK (with an older LTS kernel with various binary drivers) rather than mainline. It seems likely those systems are not going to see substantial new mainline based releases, so cavium (now owned by marvell) probably sees minimal reasons to invest their resources for support in mainline, especially now that the company has newer products with newer capabilities that are going to be the focus moving forward. Groups using that older hardware (i.e. various projects such as OpenWRT where the hardware they have re-purposed may have been a cavium octeon based router) are likely those most interested at this point. If those projects and individuals wish to keep the cavium support working that can be a good thing.