Linux 6.13 SoC Updates Land With Initial Support For Many Older Apple Devices

The four pull requests adding various SoC and board/platform support have now been merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel. This includes support for many older Apple iPad/iPhones, supporting another SoC with a combination of RISC-V and ARM cores, and a wide variety of other mostly ARM hardware support.

Most notable on the DeviceTree side is the files for a number of A-series SoCs used across older Apple iPhones and iPads. Thus with Linux 6.13 there is support for many pre-M1 Apple devices albeit in basic form. This includes support for the Apple A7, A8, A8X, A9, A9X, A10, A10X, and A11 SoCs and devices.

Also on the DeviceTree side, the Microchip sam9x7 DT is added... A very old ARMv5 platform. Arnd Bergmann noted that this is likely the last ARMv5 platform to get added to the Linux kernel given the age of the hardware. The DT for the Samsung Exynos 8895 and Exynos 990 for older Samsung Galaxy smartphones is also now supported. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G (SM7325) is also now supported by the mainline kernel.

The SoC DT updates also include the Sophgo SG2002 support for that unique SoC with one RISC-V C906 core and one Arm Cortex-A53 core. But with this current mainline support there is only the ability for running on the RISC-V processor with the LicheeRV Nano board.

The set of SoC pulls also includes a number of driver updates such as for Qualcomm SoCs, new protocol extensions for the SCMI firmware interface driver, power management for the Mediatek MT8188, and the AMD Xilinx ZynqMP SoC drivers gain support for system reboot.

See these pull requests for the now-merged bits in Linux 6.13 around new SoC and board/DeviceTree support.