Ampere Altra SMPro Co-Processor Support Getting Squared Away With Linux 6.2

Ampere Computing's SMPro is a system control processor that is an Arm Cortex-M3 serving as a co-processor and handles interfacing with the BMC, error handling, system booting, power fail detection, and other tasks. The SMPro is found starting with Ampere Computing's current Ampere Altra server processors while in Linux 6.2 a lot of its functionality is finally being upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel.

As written about previously Linux 6.2 is bringing an SMPro hardware monitoring driver for reporting temperature, power, voltages, and current information via the HWMON sysfs subsystem. Also for Linux 6.2 is a new char/misc SMPro driver for reporting the boot status and other information from this co-processor. That driver also allows adjusting the SoC power limit via the sysfs interface.

Additionally, the "smpro-error" driver is also merged for Linux 6.2 as an error monitoring and reporting driver for RAS-related errors communicated by this co-processor.

Being merged on Wednesday via mfd-next is another Ampere Computing SMPro driver for Linux 6.2. The MFD driver is the core/firmware driver for this co-processor. With that it appears the Ampere Computing SMPro Linux driver support is going to be rather ironed out with the upstream v6.2 kernel.