Broadcom BCM2835 Thermal Driver For Linux 4.12

The Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, most notably used by various Raspberry Pi boards and other SBCs, will have a thermal driver in the Linux 4.12 kernel.

As part of the thermal updates sent in to Linux 4.12, a BCM2835 SoC thermal driver is being added. The bcm2835_thermal driver exposes the SoC temperature and a critical trip point (80C or whatever is defined by the firmware). It looks like this BCM2835 driver will also work for BCM2836 and BCM2837 SoCs too with the correct DeviceTree information. This thermal driver should be useful for Raspberry Pi users putting their hardware under routine load or in more demanding environments.

The thermal updates for Linux 4.12 also has a new backup thermal shutdown mechanism to invoke a power-off/emergency-restart directly for select situations where user-space may not be able to power off the system cleanly.

More details on the thermal driver changes for this next version of the Linux kernel via this pull request.