Linux 6.11 Begins Upstreaming Support For KEBA CP500 System FPGA

Greg Kroah-Hartman described the char/misc pull request for the Linux 6.11 merge window as having "just loads of new drivers and updates." Among the new drivers is beginning to enable support for the KEBA CP500 as the latest FPGA seeing upstream kernel support.

The char/misc pull for Linux 6.11 contains new IIO drivers and the usual random assortment of other code changes that doesn't fit nicely within other subsystems / areas of the kernel. Of the new char/misc driver patches, catching my eye was KEBA CP500 system FPGA support going upstream. Unfortunately though public details on the KEBA CP500 FPGA appear light at this point.

Gerhard Engleder of KEBA explained of this new system FPGA in the driver patches:

"KEBA PLCs use a PCIe FPGA to implement several functions in a common way. This is a first step to include basic support for this FPGA.
...
The KEBA CP500 system FPGA is a PCIe device, which consists of multiple IP cores. Every IP core has its own platform driver. The cp500 driver registers a platform device for each device and the corresponding drivers are loaded by the Linux driver infrastructure.

Currently 3 variants of this device exists. Every variant has its own PCI device ID, which is used to determine the list of available IP cores. In this first version only the platform device for the I2C controller is registered.

Besides the platform device registration some other basic functions of the FPGA are implemented; e.g, FPGA version sysfs file, keep FPGA configuration on reset sysfs file, error message for errors on the internal AXI bus of the FPGA."

It looks like more KEBA CP500 functionality will be upstreamed in future kernel cycles with this just being part of the base support. KEBA is a company focused on industrial automation applications.

More details on this new driver support and many other char/misc changes can be found via this pull request that has already been merged into Linux 6.11 Git.