Linux 5.17 RISC-V Allows Rebooting Without Needing Special Driver, HiFive Unmatched Improvements

The RISC-V architecture updates for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel have been successfully submitted.

This cycle brings continued upstream work on SiFive's HiFive Unmatched RISC-V development board, which is the best, broadly available RISC-V board so far for enthusiasts, developers, and those just wanting to dabble with this royalty-free CPU architecture.

Linux 5.17 for the SiFive HiFive Unmatched brings support for the DA9063 PMIC used by the board as well as Kexec improvements to allow for running crash kernels from PCI-addressable memory on the board.

RISC-V with this new kernel also adds support for relative extables, support for the SBI SRST extension, and other fixes and clean-ups. The RISC-V SBI SRST extension provides a standardized way of powering off and rebooting the system. SBI SRST works regardless of execution mode (including for guests/VMs). Up to now RISC-V systems needed an explicit driver in Linux in order to be able to reboot the system.

More details on the changes for RISC-V in Linux 5.17 via this pull request that has already landed in mainline.