ARM Is Very Busy In The Next Kernel With A Lot For NVIDIA Tegra, Snapdragon 835 & More

The pull requests adding new ARM chip/SoC support and various platforms/boards were merged on Monday evening. For this Linux 4.20 (or 5.0) kernel cycle there is a lot of new hardware support, especially among the popular ARM SBCs. NVIDIA Tegra upstreaming bits is also another big standout for this kernel.

It's been a busy cycle for ARM with 965 change-sets queued and pulling from 101 downstream branches. Among the interesting work that's now queued for this next Linux kernel includes:

- Many NVIDIA Tegra improvements. Linaro's Arnd Bergmann noted that Tegra has now seen more changes for this kernel than it had in the two years since Linux 4.9.

- Support for the Goldelico GTA04A5 phone... A newer motherboard for going into the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner era devices.

- Support for the "Clearfog" board that uses a Marvell Armada 8040 SoC.

- On the NXP i.MX front is support for the ConnectCore 6UL SBC Pro. Sadly nothing on the i.MX front explicitly for the Purism Librem 5 smartphone efforts or bolstering the NXP i.MX8 support. One of the few i.MX8 bits is a new driver for power management with a new firmware interface.

- Support for the Raspberry Pi CM3 compute module with BCM2837. This board has been around since early 2017 but only now seeing mainline kernel support.

- Newly supported Allwinner boards include the Orange Pi Zero Plus2, Orange Pi One Plus, Pine64 LTS, Banana Pi M2+ H5,and 64-bit Banana Pi M2+ H3.

- Mainline support for the ASUS Tinker Board S with RK3288 SoC, RockPro64, Rock960, and ROC-RK-3399-PC on the Rockchip SoC front.

- HiSilicon Hi3670 SoC support and the HiKey 370 development board.

- Amlogic support for the Meson G12A chi which is a quad-core Cortex-A53 design.

- Support for the Qualcomm MSM8998 (Snapdragon 835) SoC used by new smartphones and laptops.

- ARM's TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) now has an in-kernel interface to access TEE from device drivers.

The complete lengthy list of ARM SoC/platform changes for this next kernel can be found via this mailing list post. Linux 4.20~5.0 will debut as stable either at the very end of 2018 or in the early days of 2019.