Intel M.2 Modem Driver "IOSM" Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.14

As part of Intel's new M.2 modem push for EVO laptops and Chromebooks, open-source Intel engineers have been working on "IOSM" as their new M.2 modem driver and this code which has been in the works for months is set to see its debut with the Linux 5.14 cycle.

This new Intel M.2 Modem driver is called IOSM which in this case stands for IPC over Shared Memory. The driver is summed up as, "The IOSM (IPC over Shared Memory) driver is a PCIe host driver implemented for linux or chrome platform for data exchange over PCIe interface between Host platform & Intel M.2 Modem. The driver exposes interface conforming to the MBIM protocol. Any front end application ( eg: Modem Manager) could easily manage the MBIM interface to enable data communication towards WWAN."

IOSM has seen patches going back to the end of 2020 and this driver is making use of the kernel's new WWAN framework for wireless WAN devices.

The driver has been queued into net-next as of today, thereby putting it on the table for the Linux 5.14 kernel when its merge window opens in a few weeks.

This Intel IOSM driver is nearly nine thousand lines of new kernel code. Interestingly all the references tend to be just around the "Intel M.2 Modem" without specific product mentions... When digging into the code, there is only one device ID added for the initial push: with the Intel vendor PCI ID, the only device is for a device ID of 0x7560 which corresponds to the Intel XMM 7560 modem that is based on the Fibocom L860-GL. IOSM will likely prove more interesting when it's presumably extended moving forward for their new Intel 5G Solution 5000 lineup.