Tesla FSD Chip Added To Upstream Linux 5.18 Along With The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

The upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel has mainline support available for Tesla's full self-driving SoC along with other interesting Arm hardware.

Earlier this year I wrote about Samsung working to upstream Tesla's FSD chip into the Linux kernel. This work for allowing Tesla's full self-driving chip used in their latest electric vehicles. The Tesla FSD chip is loosely based on Samsung Exynos IP so there is some overlap there and Samsung engineers carried through to get this Tesla FSD support into the upstream Linux kernel.

There is now upstream support in the Linux kernel for the Tesla FSD chip.

Not that most Tesla owners will be trying to load up a new Linux kernel or custom Linux distribution on their FSD system, this upstreaming in turn may lower the Tesla/Samsung maintenance burden moving forward with having less out-of-tree patches to carry for the kernel build in their software environment. The Tesla FSD SoC is made up of three clusters of four Cortex-A72 processor cores and several extra IP blocks. The Linux kernel support code for the Tesla FSD SoC at this stage is just under 4k lines of new code, on top of all the existing Samsung and AArch64 code within the mainline kernel.

Tesla FSD SoC support in the mainline Linux kernel!

The Tesla FSD chip support has been mainlined as of last night into the Linux 5.18 kernel with its merge window ongoing. The DeviceTree updates also include adding the Airoha EN7523 networking SoC, Mediatek MT6582 tablet platform, Microchip Lan966 networking SoC, Qualcomm Snapdragon 625/632 SoCs used by the LG Nexus 5X and Fairphone FP3, Renesas RZ/G2LC and RZ/V2L SoCs, and the Samsung Exynos 850 / 7885 SoCs. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is also now supported by the mainline Linux 5.18 kernel. The Rockchip Bananapi-R2-Pro is another Arm SBC added too.

The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is also now supported by the mainline Linux kernel.

Meanwhile the Arm SoC patches include support for the Cortex-M7 based i.MXRT10xx series, dropping NOMMU ARMv4/ARMv5 platforms, continuing to cleanup the Intel IXP4xx platform code, and other improvements.

Merged on Wednesday night were also the other Tesla FSD support drivers, memory controller updates for Tegra and Mediatek hardware, SCMI firmware interface updates, and improved power management for Mediate kMT81xx / NXP i.MXM8MQ / NVIDIA Tegra hardware.