Linux 4.1 Supports Annapurna's Alpine & Other ARM Platform Work

There's yet more to talk about with regard to the Linux 4.1 kernel and some of the latest patches queued up for merging are the numerous ARM improvements.

The ARM pull requests for Linux 4.1 aren't as large as some of the past kernel cycles, but is still sizable and contains a few items worth mentioning.

- The Annapurna Labs "Alpine" platform is now supported. The Alpine platform from Annapruan Labs is aimed for storage and networking appliances and is sold as a "Platform-On-Chip" with two to four Cortex-A15 cores, seamless networking and storage fabric, and other changes. Support for this initial Annapurna platform within the mainline Linux kernel has been baking on the mailing lists for a few months. One of the products based on Alpine is the Gigabyte D120-S3G, which is an ARM storage server that handles up to 16 3.5-inch disks in a 1U platform. Annapurna Labs was acquired by Amazon.com earlier this year.

- Samsung's Exynos 3250 has cpuidle and power management improvements.

- When it comes to a 64-bit ARM addition, Linux 4.1 has support for the Qualcomm MSM8916 SoC. There's also support for the Spreadtrum's Sharkl64 Platform and the Xilinx ZynqMP SoC.

- Atmel AT91 now has ARM multi-platform kernel support and Shmobile is also moving in this direction. The multi-platform support is allowing support for multiple ARM platforms/SoCs to be compiled into a single ARM Linux kernel image.

More of the ARM fixes and other SoC changes for Linux 4.1 can be found via this ARM changes series that was mailed out today to Linus Torvalds and kernel developers.