Basic AMD Pensando Elba SoC Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 6.7

The long ongoing saga of upstreaming AMD's Pensando Elba SoC support is now partially over with the initial enablement patches around the DeviceTree being queued as part of the SoC changes destined for the Linux 6.7 kernel cycle.

As written about in late September, limited support for the AMD Pensando Elba SoC is going to be upstreamed after a year and a half of publishing sixteen rounds of code review for this SoC intended to serve as a data processing unit (DPU) for infrastructure offloading around storage and networking.

What makes this initial mainline kernel support limited or basic is that the SoC controller driver isn't yet ready to be mainlining, so just the initial SoC support/DeviceTree are landing for those non-controversial bits. The SoC controller driver will hopefully be upstreamed in the not too distant future once there is consensus among the AMD/Pensando developers and other upstream kernel maintainers.

At the end of last week the initial Pensando SoC patches were picked up by SoC.git's soc/dt branch ahead of the Linux 6.7 merge window opening up around the end of October or early November. The AMD-Pensando Elba SoC consists of sixteen Arm Cortex-A72 cores, dual DDR4/DDR5 memory controllers, 32 lanes of PCIe Gen3 or Gen4 connectivity, up to dual 200 GbE or quad 100 GbE networking, storage and crypto offloading, and other features for DPU use-cases.