AMD-Pensando Elba SoC & A Massive RISC-V 64-Core Chip Supported In Linux 6.7

There is some interesting new Arm and RISC-V SoC support to be found in the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel.

I've long been covering the upstreaming process around AMD's Pensando Elba SoC support and with Linux 6.7 that initial support is in place for this data processing unit (DPU) for offloading storage and networking tasks. But still to be upstreamed is Elba's SoC controller driver with just the base support making it for Linux 6.7. The Elba SoC consists of sixteen Arm Cortex-A72 cores, dual DDR4/DDR5 memory controllers, 32 lanes of PCIe Gen3 or Gen4 connectivity, up to dual 200 GbE or quad 100 GbE networking, storage and crypto offloading, and other features for DPU use-cases.

Also notable with the Linux 6.7 SoC updates is initial support for Sophgo RISC-V chips. The CV1800B is now supported as used by the Milk-V Duo board.

But even more exciting than that little Milk-V Duo board is preparations for the Sophgo SG2042 chip. The SG2042 is being used by the Milk-V Pioneer for a 64-core RISC-V mATX workstation board.

Milk-V hopes to begin shipping the Pioneer in December with pre-orders at $1499 USD. The Milk-V Pioneer looks to be quite interesting and hopefully we'll get a review sample at Phoronix. The SG2042 with its 64 cores clock up to 2.0GHz and have a shared 64MB L3 cache and support quad channel DDR4-3200 memory. The SG2042 has a 120 Watt TDP.

Also added with Linux 6.7 is support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G (SM7125), Rensas R-Car S4-8 automotive SoC, and the Rensas RZ/G3S embedded SoC.

The DT updates in Linux 6.7 also add support for the US Robotics USR8200 NAS/firewall/router, several NXP i.MX5 and i.MX6 boards, and new machines based on the ASpeed AST2600, Allwinner V3s, and others.

Some other Arm additions for Linux 6.7 include support for the Qualcomm Secure Execution Environment firmware interface, Arm FF-A firmware v1.1 support, SCMI v3.2 firmware support, and various other updates.

All of the SoC and platform driver updates for Linux 6.7 can be found via this set of pull requests for the ongoing merge window.