The "Catch-All" Driver Subsystem Changes Sent In For Linux 5.5
In the pull request Greg commented, "Here is the big set of char/misc and other driver patches for 5.5-rc1 Loads of different things in here, this feels like the catch-all of driver subsystems these days." Indeed, char/misc these days is a random smothering of work. There had been talk previously of spinning out portions like a proposed hardware accelerator subsystem but as it stands now no major splits to char/misc but it just continues increasing in scope.
Some of the char/misc changes for Linux 5.5 consist of:
- Ice Lake and Tiger Lake support added to the Intel Trace Hub (intel_th) driver.
- A new Qualcomm Interconnect driver for Network-on-Chip MSM8974-based platforms. The driver sets the bandwidth requirements between different network-on-chip fabrics and other functionality.
- Thunderbolt code now exposes the generation of the Thunderbolt controller in the devices and that's exposed to user-space via sysfs. The primary purpose of this patch is being able to differentiate in user-space between Thunderbolt and USB4 connected devices.
- Also on the Thunderbolt side is the Thunderbolt 3 software connection manager work for helping to improve Apple hardware support on Linux.
- A new PHY driver for USB3 on the Allwinner H6 SoC.
- The EEPROM driver has been officially deprecated. Instead users should be running at "at24" kernel driver that already handles most I2C EEPROM functionality.
- New driver additions around the ASpeed AST2600.
- Habana Labs preparing for future ASIC support with their AI accelerator chips.
- Various SoundWire improvements.
More of the char/misc changes can be found via the PR.
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