Linux 6.8 Adds New Gaming Handhelds, Google Tensor & Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 + X Elite SoCs

All of the ARM SoC and platform driver changes have been submitted for the Linux 6.8 kernel that include bringing up the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs, enabling various low-cost gaming handheld console devices, finally upstreaming Google Tensor G1 support, and other hardware additions.

There are six new AArch64 SoCs added for Linux 6.8 including the Samsung Exynos Auto v920, Google GS101 (Tensor G1), MediaTek MT8188, Qualcomm SM8650 (Snapdragon 8 Gen 3), Qualcomm X1E80100 (Snapdragon X Elite), and Unisoc UMS9620 (Tanggula 7).

It's about time the Google Tensor G1 SoC was upstreamed that has been used by various Pixel smartphones. It's also great seeing the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 as their current top-end smartphone SoC being upstreamed as well as the Snapdragon X Elite for their new laptop SoC using Qualcomm's Oryon cores. It's great seeing the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 able to run on the mainline kernel.

In other ARM development work, five old Microsoft Lumia smartphones are supported by Linux 6.8 now along with some other smartphones like the Motorola Moto G 4G a nd HTC One Mini 2.

Also notable with the ARM changes for Linux 6.8 is supporting several cheap ARM-powered handheld game consoles. The Anbernic RG351V, Powkiddy RK2023, and Powkiddy X55 are now supported by the mainline Linux 6.8 kernel for these Rockchip-powered ARM gaming handhelds suitable for running various old/retro games.

Linux 6.8 aldo adds support for new Lenovo, ASUS, and Acer Chromebooks that employ the Mediatek MT8183 SoC.

There are various other ARM hardware changes such as the Apple M1 mailbox driver being adapted into a SoC driver, Mediatek Smart Voltage Scaling for various SOCs, and other improvements.

There is some code removed this cycle, in particular dropping the old ARM11 MPCore CPU support.

The SoC pull also includes RISC-V material that for Linux 6.8 includes the Huashan Pi board based on the SophGo CV1812H RISC-V chip.

See this set of pulls for all of the ARM platform/SoC changes submitted for Linux 6.8.