New Xilinx Drivers, GNSS Reciver USB Driver & Habana Labs Updates Land In Linux 5.17

Sent in to the Linux kernel on Friday were the "char/misc" updates as the smorgasbord of kernel changes not fitting formally within other areas of the kernel. The char/misc changes range from AI accelerator driver updates to new Xilinx code to other random changes littered throughout.

Char/misc for Linux 5.17 is as diverse as ever. Among the many changes bringing in roughly 26.9k lines of new code (and 4.5k lines removed) include items such as:

- The Xilinx event management driver is new and is used for notifications from firmware. This can be used for error events, device events, and more.

- The Xilinx AMS driver is also new and it is used for voltage/temperature monitoring with Xilinx Ultrascale devices.

- Analog Devices AD74413R/AD74412R IIO device support.

- The Habana Labs AI accelerator driver continues seeing a lot of work including support for reading historic errors, keeping information access available during hard resets, new sysfs reporting information, ioctl additions, and other changes this cycle.

- Intel Thunder Bay eMMC PHY support.

- A generic driver for GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) receivers with a USB interface has been added. The initially supported device by this GNSS USB driver is the Sierra Wireless XM1210 receiver.

- The Amazon AWS Nitron Enclaves driver adds support to merge contiguous physical memory regions.

See this pull request that already landed into the kernel tree for a look at the changes this cycle.