3.15 Fedora ARM kernel status

There’s been quite a bit of water under the bridge since my post on the 3.14 kernel status. With 3.15.x due to land in Fedora 20 shortly I thought I’d give an overview of changes for 3.15 and what’s happened since the last post.

From a shiny new devices and features point of view the 3.15 kernel is relatively boring on the ARM devices front, the advantage of that was that from a development point of view things tended to just work on Fedora. Running a diff between out 3.14 and 3.15 ARM kernel configs and checking our shipped Device Tree Blobs I get the following main changes:

• Enabling of Marvell Dove platform. This primarily will be useful for people with the Original Cubox
• SunXi MMC suuport. The enables initial basic support (Serial/MMC/network) for a number of AllWinner platforms
• Zynq 7xxx platform improvements
• OMAP DRM driver conversion to Device Tree (more on that below)
• Initial Utilite support. It’s pretty basic with support for serial, MMC/SATA, and one of the two NICS. I plan on improving this soon
• Added Device Tree support for a number of OMAP Overo devices
• Added Device Tree support for a number of i.MX6 based devices

So while it was boring form a new device support point of view a kernel cycle for ARM is never really that boring! There was a lot of nice improvements generally under the hood and the march toward Device Tree is basically complete. I’m not aware of any device now that is supported not through DT in Fedora.

I mentioned above OMAP DRM. In the 3.14 post I mentioned I was sure we’d get Panda working soon. And we did! The main issue remaining was actually display support with 3.14 and with 3.15 that problem is now mostly closed because all the connectors and their associated drivers now support DT which meeans all the modules now load in the right order and things mostly just work. There’s some further improvments here in Xorg userspace in rawhide so I’d sugggest trying a nightly or the not far off Fedora 21 Alpha.

I’ve also had a few cycles to test Marvell mvebu support on my Mirabox and fixed a few kernel issues here so it now works. Unfortunately Marvell’s support of uboot, and hence Device Tree, is from the last decade and hence fairly horrible! I’ll save details of that for another post.