RISC-V For Linux 5.8 Finishes Bringing Up The Kendryte K210, Adds KGDB Support

The RISC-V architecture code in the Linux kernel continues seeing more improvements for running on real hardware and seeing other capabilities introduced.

Back for Linux 5.7 there was initial code landing for the Kendryte K210 SoC while now for Linux 5.8 this RISC-V SoC actually has operational support. The Kendryte K210 is a dual-core RISC-V 64-bit SoC rated for 0.8 TFLOPS and designed for neural network workloads with having dedicated image recognition hardware. While not too fast, the reported power consumption is said to be less than one Watt for this TSMC 28nm manufactured SoC. The reported base clock is 400MHz but is said to be overclock-friendly. With Linux 5.8 there were more DeviceTree bits needed for the K210 and other changes, but now at least all of the necessary code should be in place.

Another important RISC-V addition for Linux 5.8 is KGDB debugger support... RISC-V finally supports this key Linux kernel debugger facility.

This pull request outlines these and other RISC-V architecture changes coming for this summer 2020 kernel update.