More Apple Silicon M1 Bring-Up On The Way For Linux 5.17

The enablement work for supporting Apple's M1 SoC under Linux continues and with the v5.17 kernel next year will be yet more additions.

Among the new driver activity for Linux 5.17 is an Apple PMGR driver for controlling the power states. The Apple PMGR block on their SoC has high-level power state controls for SoC devices. At the moment not all features are supported but important step forward for power management with Apple Silicon on Linux.

Also important on the power management front is enable clock gating for the previously mainlined Apple PCIe driver. PCI Express clock gating is also important for power reasons and that PCI change is queued up too for Linux 5.17.

Sent out this morning were also the Apple SoC DeviceTree updates for Linux 5.17. Among that work is the DT handling for the WiFI MAC address, bindings for the new PMGR driver, i2c and cd321x nodes, and other work.

This latest batch of Apple Silicon patches for the Linux kernel were submitted by Hector Martin with the Asahi Linux project. The effort continues moving forward for those interested in running ARM-based Apple Macs on Linux and will be interesting to see what they accomplish in 2022 particularly on the graphics front.