Alibaba T-Head TH1520 RISC-V CPU & A Few New Arm SoCs Ready For Linux 6.5

The Arm (and RISC-V) SoC updates have been submitted for merging to the Linux 6.5 kernel. Additions this cycle include an exciting RISC-V processor now supported, NVIDIA Tegra234 "Orin" upstream additions, and other new SoCs and devices/boards being upstreamed.

Alibaba T-Head TH1520 support is arguably most exciting of these new pull requests, but it remains to be seen if this higher-performing RISC-V SoC will work its way to western markets. It's said to be coming with the ROMA laptop while we'll see if that ultimately plays out.

Highlights of the five SoC pull requests for the Linux 6.5 merge window include:

- Support for the Alibaba T-Head TH1520 RISC-V 64-bit processor. This is a quad-core Xuantie C910 that can clock up to 2.5GHz.

- Newly supported Arm SoCs with Linux 6.5 include the Samsung Exynos 4212, Amlogic C3 (Cortex-A35 based for smart IP cameras), Qualcomm Snapdragon 615, Qualcomm 8cx as used in the Lenovo Flex 5G laptop, and Qualcomm SDX75. Along with the SoC support itself, the respective reference boards for each SoC are also enabled.

- New SoC family support include the Nuvoton MA35D1 and the STMicroelectronics STM32MP2 for these dual-core Arm Cortex-A35 powered SoCs intended for industrial/embedded use.

- NVIDIA IGX Orin and Jetson Orin Nano boards are now added to the mainline kernel.

- Six new reference boards for Qualcomm hardware.

- Mainline support for the Acer Aspire 1 Arm laptop.

- The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua phone is now supported on the mainline kernel.

- Support for many newer Rockchip boards including the Indiedroid Nova, Edgeble Neural Compute Module 6B, FriendlyARM NanoPi R2C Plus, Lunzn Fastrhino, and others.

The full list of SoC changes for Linux 6.5 via the kernel mailing list.