Apple Silicon GPIO Driver Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.16

Along with the Apple Silicon PCIe driver, another new driver for supporting Apple Silicon (primarily with a focus on the Apple M1 for now) with the upcoming Linux 5.16 cycle is a new pinctrl/GPIO driver.

Queued overnight into the linux-pinctrl.git's "for-next" branch is the 500+ lines of code driver developed by Arm's Joey Gouly and Corellium's Stan Skowronek for bringing up the pinctrl/GPIO support for Apple SoCs.

This pinctrl-apple-gpio driver is in good enough shape now for premiering in the mainline kernel with Linux 5.16 alongside the growing number of other Apple SoC drivers. The Apple Silicon support on Linux is increasingly becoming usable but there still is a lot of work on the GPU side as well as on the CPU frequency scaling / power management side for ensuring proper performance, among other areas with driver work still pending.

The pinctrl-apple-gpio driver can be found via this linux-pinctrl.git commit while waiting for the Linux 5.16 merge window to kick off in the next week or two. Linux 5.16 in turn should be out as stable around the start of the new year with a growing list of new features.