3.19 Fedora ARM kernel status

I’ve been a bit lazy on the ARM kernel status updates. There wasn’t one at all for 3.18 but the fact was, that while there was lots of under the hood improvements for ARM/aarch64, the new device support or improvements from a user’s point of view was positively boring so I never bothered!

That said the 3.19 kernel is now on it’s way to the stable Fedora releases and there’s some bit of interest there 🙂

Beginning with aarch64 there’s been a raft of code support landing upstream for the core platforms we support (VExpress, APM Storm, and AMD Seattle) which means the enablement patch set has shrunk massively. The core missing bit from this is primarily the ACPI patches for the server standards. There’s also been a lot of stability improvements for various device drivers particularly on the APM Storm SoC (which massively helps the high network and IO traffic we generate when doing composes in release engineering!). Other improvements include support for seccomp. The upstream support for aarch64 is really starting to settle down nicely which is good because there’s devices finally starting to get to the point where they’ll be more widely available and affordable 🙂

On to ARMv7 changes. In terms of new supported SoCs the support for AllWinner A-23 (aka sun8i) is the most interesting in terms of new devices. There was also a lot of general SoC improvements and cleanups. The largest here is probably Rockchips, QCom and ZYNQ with notable mentions to Tegra, OMAP and i.MX6 too. In terms of new devices we now solely support DeviceTree devices and the built .dtb files we ship that are possible to support with the kernel jumped from 250 to 265 devices. Of course it doesn’t mean we’re testing all of those devices but we’re testing devices across all main SoC groups to ensure at least the core support works. Of course feedback for what works and doesn’t is always welcome. In this cycle there was also significant driver work with special mention to Hans and his significant movement on the Allwinner devices.

I’ll do a longer post for 4.0 and the new u-boot we’ll be supporting in Fedora 22 soon.

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