Linux 5.19 ARM Excites With Apple M1 NVMe, 12 Year Old Multi-Platform Achievement

The various ARM SoC and machine/platform updates have landed in the Linux 5.19 kernel with a number of notable additions.

First up there is ARMv4T/v5 multi-platform support. It's been "12 years in the making" and "mostly finishes the work that was started with the founding of Linaro to clean up platform support in the kernel." The ARM multi-platform support is about allowing one kernel to handle multiple ARM platforms. Going back to Linux 3.7 this was introduced and worked on for various targets... Now in Linux 5.19 the old ARMv4T/v5 is seeing multi-platform love.

"The s3c24xx, ixp4xx, iop32x, ep93xx and dove platforms were all almost at the point of allowing multiplatform kernels, this work gets completed here along with a few additional cleanup. At the same time, the s3c24xx and s3c64xx are now deprecated and expected to get removed in the future." More details on the Arm multi-platform work for Linux 5.19 via this merge.

Meanwhile new SoC support in Linux 5.19 includes:

- Renesas RZ/G2UL (R9A07G043)
- Renesas RZ/V2M (R9A09G011)
- Renesas R-Car V4H (R8A779G0)
- Broadcom BCM47622
- Corstone1000
- Mediatek MT8195 (Kompanio 1200)
- NXP i.MXRT1050

With Linux 5.19 there is also a number of new machines supported with existing SoCs. In Linux 5.19 there is support for two WiFi routers based on the Broadcom BCM4708, a total of 30 new boards based on NXP i.MX6/i.MX7/i.MX8, two Ethernet switches using the Microchip LAN966, eight Qualcomm Snapdragon devices including a smartwatch and Chromebook, and various other boards. More details here.

Linux continues seeing a lot of ARM-based hardware support additions to mainline each cycle.

When it comes to Arm drivers there is a new bus driver for the Qualcomm Snap Dragon Sensor Core (SSC) and Apple M1 now supports the on-chip NVMe controller. For those wanting to run NVMe storage on the Apple M1, the M1 NVMe support is working with this next kernel and another accomplishment out of the Asahi Linux project.

Lastly for the defconfig changes there is the kernel config changes for AT91 to be able to boot a file-system image using systemd.