Broadcom Is Baking North Star 2 Support For The Linux Kernel

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Broadcom Is Baking North Star 2 Support For The Linux Kernel

Broadcom's North Star 2 is a yet-to-be-announced SoC design based on 64-bit ARMv8 and marketed under their iProc family...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Broadcom-North-Star-2

[duby229]

Is this related at all to the North Star service GM uses for their cars?

[schmidtbag]

It's great to see Broadcom continuing to promptly submit more code for eventual inclusion into the mainline Linux kernel.

Seeing as Linux is pretty much the only reason they're still in the ARM game, they owe a hell of a lot more to linux than stuff like this.

[Sonadow]

I will much rather see Broadcom mainline their ethernet and wireless drivers to the kernel instead of maintaining them out-of-tree.

The wl driver works, but it is never in step with the ever-changing kernel APIs and ABIs. More often than not the vanilla wl driver is not buildable on new kernels, and we always require kind souls to make their own patches to the driver and publish it somewhere so that non-programmers like be can successfully build the wl module for newer kernels.

I don't see ARM ever taking x86's place for the forseeable future. CC-sized, ARM-powered computers can only do so much.

[DanL]

Is this related at all to the North Star service GM uses for their cars?

I'm pretty sure it's related to the old Minnesota North Stars hockey team.

[name99]

Is this related at all to the North Star service GM uses for their cars?

It's the sort of name that's "cool" enough to be used for multiple projects. The IBM RSII CPU (1998) was codenamed Northstar. Hell, IBM likes the codename enough that they re-used in 2011 for some sort of program that analyses customer web sites and recommends a variety of ways to improve them.