Mobileye EyeQ 5 SoC Support Being Worked On For The Mainline Linux Kernel
Similar to the Tesla FSD chip having mainline Linux kernel support via Samsung, the Mobileye EyeQ5 SoC could soon see mainline kernel support. While developed under Intel leadership and Intel continues to have majority ownership, the EyeQ5 SoC is a MIPS-based chip. Mobileye has since announced the EyeQ 6 as well but the current Linux upstreaming effort is just around the the EyeQ 5. Mobileye has long leveraged Linux and the hardware is likely using its own downstream kernel and other components while having this SoC support upstream helps with the maintenance burden moving forward and making it easier for them to eventually move to newer versions of the Linux kernel if needed.
Gregory Clement of Bootlin who has been leading the upstreaming effort for this Mobileye SoC explained of the chip:
"The EyeQ5 SoC from Mobileye is based on the MIPS I6500 architecture and features multiple controllers such as the classic UART, I2C, SPI, as well as CAN-FD, PCIe, Octal/Quad SPI Flash interface, Gigabit Ethernet, MIPI CSI-2, and eMMC 5.1. It also includes a Hardware Security Module, Functional Safety Hardware, and MJPEG encoder.
One peculiarity of this SoC is that the physical address of the DDDR exceeds 32 bits. Given that the architecture is 64 bits, this is not an issue, but it requires some changes in how the mips64 is currently managed during boot."
A set of 11 patches get the Mobileye EyeQ 5 SoC enabled with the upstream Linux kernel state as well as adding the necessary DeviceTree for the evaluation/reference board.
While the EyeQ 5 SoC is MIPS64-based, moving forward for future hardware Mobileye continues to partner with MIPS but will be RISC-V based. Besides the MIPS64 ISA being at a dead-end, the two companies announced last year that future Mobileye SoCs will use the MIPS eVocore RISC-V CPUs.
Add A Comment
