Official x86 Zhaoxin Processor Support Is Coming With Linux 5.3

Zhaoxin is the company producing Chinese x86 CPUs created by a joint venture between VIA and the Shanghai government. The current Zhaoxin ZX CPUs are based on VIA's Isaiah design and making use of VIA's x86 license. With the Linux 5.3 kernel will be better support for these Chinese desktop x86 CPUs.

Future designs of the Zhaoxin processors call for 7nm manufacturing, PCI Express 4.0, DDR5, and other features to put it on parity with modern Intel and AMD CPUs. It remains to be seen how well that will work out, but certainly seems to be moving along in the desktop/consumer space for Chinese-built x86 CPUs while in the server space there's the Hygon Dhyana EPYC-based processors filling the space for Chinese servers.

Queued as part of the x86 CPU changes ahead of next month's Linux 5.3 merge window are continued work on improving the Linux support for Zhaoxin hardware. Last year saw the initial Linux support while another round of changes are coming to this next kernel version.

There is now the formal support along with introducing a new CPU_SUP_ZHAOXIN kernel configuration switch to enable detection/tunings/quirks around these processors. There are also a few other patches from Zhaoxin adding other features/quirks to their Linux support.