Samsung's Latest Linux Upstreaming Work For The Tesla FSD SoC Is PCIe Support

At the start of the calendar year Samsung engineers posted Linux patches bringing to enable the Tesla full self-driving "FSD" SoC within the mainline Linux kernel. Linux 5.18 picked up the initial Tesla FSD SoC support and since then other support remnants have continued to be worked on like media functionality. The latest open-source, upstream-focused Tesla FSD SoC work is on enabling PCIe functionality.

This week a Samsung engineer posted the set of six patches amounting to two thousand lines of code for getting PCI Express working with the Tesal FSD SoC for the mainline kernel. The FSD platform makes use of three instances of PCIe controllers derived from DesignWare IP.

The PCIe patches are now out for review as this continued Tesla FSD SoC enablement work continues for the Linux kernel.

Tesla's FSD SoC premiered in 2019 and manufactured on a 14nm process and features a dozen Cortex-A72 cores, Mali G71 GPU, two neural processing units, and various other extra IP blocks. Now over the past year there has been work by Samsung -- who developed the SoC in cooperation with Tesla -- to get many of the relevant patches mainlined in the Linux kernel. Presumably they are pursuing this affair now to reduce some of their technical debt and the need for carrying so many out-of-tree patches that can be a pain to re-base to new LTS kernel versions, etc.