More OpenRISC LiteX Drivers Expected To Be Upstreamed In Linux

While RISC-V secures much of the spotlight these days when it comes to open-source processor instruction set architectures, OpenRISC is still moving along and soon should see more OpenRISC LiteX drivers upstreamed.

In recent kernels we have seen work around OpenRISC LiteX as a Migen/MiSoC CPU/SoC builder for deployments on FPGAs with soft-core implementations of PicoRV32, VexRISCV, and more. Moving ahead, the OpenRISC developers are now on a path for upstreaming more peripheral drivers into the mainline kernel.

For the ongoing Linux 5.14 merge window the OpenRISC update has a single change to remove the 8-bit sub-register option. This change is to simplify the MMIO register access with the LiteX code by limiting them to 32-bit offsets.

While just a small change for Linux 5.14, now that this change has been made, "now this is agreed among Litex hardware and kernel developers it will allow us to start upstreaming other Litex peripheral drivers," noted OpenRISC kernel maintainer Stafford Horne.

Those wanting to learn more about LiteX can do so via the project's GitHub.

When it comes to OpenRISC on commercial hardware implementations, that is an area still not seeing as much interest as vendors investing in RISC-V.