Initial IBM Power11 Enablement Begins With Linux 6.9

As noted a month ago that IBM was starting on Power11 CPU/platform enablement for the mainline Linux kernel, indeed the first batch of Power11 code has now been merged for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel.

On Friday the PowerPC architecture updates were merged for Linux 6.9, including the first bits of Power11 and other elements:

- Add AT_HWCAP3 and AT_HWCAP4 aux vector entries for future use by glibc

- Add support for recognising the Power11 architected and raw PVRs

- Add support for nr_cpus=n on the command line where the boot CPU is >= n

- Add ppcxx_allmodconfig targets for all 32-bit sub-arches

- Other small features, cleanups and fixes

With IBM beginning to post explicit Power11 kernel patches rather than just the "PowerPC Future" patches, it looks like they may begin talking about next-gen Power11 processors sooner rather than later.

See this Git merge for more details on the new Power feature code for Linux 6.9 while more Power11 enablement will follow in Linux v6.10+.