New ARM/RISC-V SoC Power Management Drivers Arrive For Linux 6.3

Following last week's SoC and platform updates that included mainlining of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 support, new Qualcomm 5G RAN platform support, and many more Arm boards being enabled, this week saw the SoC driver updates now submitted.

Arnd Bergmann this week sent out the SoC driver updates to complement his various ARM/RISC-V pulls from last week. Notable of these driver updates are some new power management drivers for different SoCs.

One of the new drivers is the Allwinner D1 PPU driver, which is for the Allwinner D1 PPU power domain. This driver enables the hardware power sequence engine that can allow for saving power when certain peripherals are idle like the SoC's video engine. That's good news for this first Allwinner RISC-V SoC to have improved power management with Linux 6.3 and complements other D1 work that's been mainlined in prior cycles.

Also new is the StarFive JH7110 power domain driver (jh71xx_pmu) for power domain controller support with this SoC that's used by the VisionFive 2 RISC-V board. The less than 500 lines will help with improving power efficiency for that other increasingly-used SoC for the popular VisionFive boards.

On the Arm side is also Renesas RZ/V2M external power sequence controller (PWC) support. Linux 6.3 also brings the Qualcomm Ramp Controller driver that is needed by some older Qualcomm SoCs for enabling CPU DVFS (Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling) support.

More details on these driver updates via this pull request.