Additional MIPS Release 6 Changes Heading Into Linux 5.1

The upstream Linux kernel support for the MIPS architecture continues to be improved upon, which is great news especially with this processor ISA going open-source. With the Linux 5.1 kernel are more MIPS improvements.

While the MIPS32/MIPS64 Release 6 architecture has been out there since 2014 with many design improvements, with Linux 5.1 we are seeing more bits supported. The latest MIPS Release 6 being implemented for the mainline Linux kernel are support for the MemoryMapID register and Global Invalidate TLB instructions, enabling huge-page support for MIPS64r6, and other changes.

Other MIPS work happening this cycle includes correctly calculating the number of pages allocated for interrupt stacks, DeviceTree support for the ATH79 platform, Cavium Octeon platform cleaning, and various other code improvements.

More details on this round of MIPS improvements for Linux 5.1 via this pull request.