Linux 5.4 Adds Qualcomm Snapdragon 855, Supports Some Newer ARM Laptops

The ARM SoC platform and driver changes landed on Monday during the first full day of the Linux 5.4 merge window. There is some exciting ARM hardware support improvements for this kernel while doing away with some older platforms.

Highlights of the ARM changes merged into Linux Git on Monday include:

- Support for the Snapdragon 855 by the mainline Linux kernel but at this point only the Qualcomm SM8150 MTP reference platform is supported and not any Snapdragon 855 products.

- Support for the ASpeed AST2600 that we should begin seeing on servers / server motherboards in 2020 as a big hardware upgrade over the very common ASpeed AST2500.

- The ASUS NovaGo, HP EnvyX2, and Lenovo Miix 630 laptops are now supported by the mainline Linux kernel that are all powered by the Snapdragon 835. In addition, the Lenovo Yoga C630 on the Snapdragon 850 also works on the mainline 5.4 kernel at least for basic functionality. These ARM laptops have shipped with Windows while the Linux support to date has relied upon a maze of out-of-tree patches. But some bits of functionality might not be mainline yet for Linux 5.4 though at least the mainline kernel can boot on these devices.

- Mediatek MT7629 and NXP i.MX8M Nano SoC support.

- More x86 and POWER9 boards with ASpeed BMC chips can now run Linux on them via OpenBMC.

- The removal of some older Intel XScale chips along with removing Kendin/Micrel/Microchip KS8695 and Winbond/Nuvoton W90x900 hardware support with no one believed to be using this hardware anymore at least while running a modern kernel.

There are also a variety of lesser known ARM SBCs now being supported by Linux 5.4 and a variety of other ARM hardware platform support improvements. Linux 5.4 will be out as stable in November.