Several Older NVIDIA Tegra Powered Tablets To Be Supported By Linux 5.17

For those that happen to have older ASUS Transformer tablets powered by a NVIDIA Tegra SoC, the Linux 5.17 kernel cycle early next year is enabling a number of them to work off the mainline kernel.

A batch of patches were sent out this week intended for the Linux 5.17 cycle for improving the older NVIDIA Tegra support with the mainline kernel.

DeviceTree additions set for Linux 5.17 include adding support for the ASUS Transformer Prime TF201, ASUS Transformer Pad TF300TG, and ASUS Transformer Infinity TF700T. These are older NVIDIA Tegra 3 era devices. Tegra 3 as a reminder features a quad-core Cortex-A9 design with a fifth companion core and was their first SoC supporting ARM's NEON. Tegra 3 is already a decade old while the NVIDIA graphics with this SoC were good for the time.

The specs on these ASUS Transformer tablets aren't all that great by today's standards, but the Linux 5.17 enablement could be fun if you happen to have one of these devices laying around or happen to find them very cheap in a second-hand bin.

The Tegra 3 powered Pegatron Chagall / Fujitsu Stylistic M532 is also set to see mainline DeviceTree support in this next kernel. There is also a new DT variant for the Byan Big Chromebook with 1080p panel.

Also notable with these patches around Tegra for Linux 5.17 is enabling the video decoder support for the Tegra114 (Tegra 4).