Linux 4.17 Sees Port To Andes NDS32 CPU Architecture

While Linux 4.17 is set to drop support for some older/unmaintained CPU architectures, it looks like it will land at least one new port for Linux 4.17 for the Andes NDS32 CPU architecture.

Andes Technology AndesCore 32-bit NDS32 is a RISC-like architecture, intended for high power efficiency, and some of their AndesCore processors feature clock rates above 1GHz. AndesCore processors appear primarily intended for IoT, wearables, medical devices, and other low-power/small-footprint scenarios.

Andes Technology Open-Source Development Kit (Andes OSDK) has provided Linux kernel patches going back to the 3.x days as well as for GCC, Binutils, GDB, etc. Andes also supports real-time operating systems like FreeRTOS and eCos on their hardware. But now we're finally seeing mainline kernel support for these 32-bit processors.

After going through seven rounds of patch review, it appears the port is ready for mainline and has been called for merging with the just-opened 4.17 cycle. Adding in this new CPU port is just under twelve thousand lines of new kernel code.