SUSE Working To Upstream RP1 Southbridge Linux Driver For The Raspberry Pi 5

The Raspberry Pi 5 features the "RP1" as the in-house silicon design for the southbridge to this single board computer. The RP1 driver maintained by Raspberry Pi is just found in their downstream kernel while a SUSE engineer is working to rework that driver so that it can be eventually mainlined in the upstream Linux kernel.

Andrea della Porta of SUSE has been working to upstream more of the Raspberry Pi 5 support where applicable for the mainline Linux kernel and in some cases reworking the downstream code currently maintained by the Raspberry Pi developers. Andrea last month posted patches so the upstream kernel can boot on the Raspberry Pi 5 while the latest change is on supporting the RP1 southbridge.

Raspberry Pi's RP1 southbridge provides for four lanes of PCI Express 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet MAC, two USB 3 host controllers, dual SDIO ports / eMMC, two MIPI transceivers, a video DAC, low-speed peripherals, and PWM audio out. More details on the RP1 can be found via the Raspberry Pi documentation.

Andrea has posted a request for comments with preparations underway to rework the downstream RP1 driver so that it can become fit for upstreaming. Those interested in the technical discussions over creating an upstream-applicable RP1 driver can check out that kernel mailing list thread for details. But long story short it looks like it will still be some months before potentially having all of the Raspberry Pi 5 bits working well in a mainline Linux kernel version.