A Massive ARM v6/v7 Rework Is Landing With Linux 4.5 Plus Raspberry Pi 2 Support

With the Linux 4.5 kernel the ARMv6/ARMv7 platforms are now multi-platform after five years of work.

Olof Johansson sent in all of the ARM SoC updates for the Linux 4.5 merge window on Friday night. Most significant is the ARM multi-platform code update. Olof explained, "This branch is the culmination of 5 years of effort to bring the ARMv6 and ARMv7 platforms together such that they can all be enabled and boot the same kernel. It has been a tremendous amount of cleanup and refactoring by a huge number of people, and creation of several new (and major) subsystems to better abstract out all the platform details in an appropriate manner. The bulk of this branch is a large patchset from Arnd that brings several of the more minor and older platforms we have closer to multiplatform support. Among these are MMP, S3C64xx, Orion5x, mv78xx0 and realview Much of this is moving around header files from old mach directories, but there are also some cleanup patches of debug_ll (lowlevel debug per-platform options) and other parts."

The patch series also has Sigma Designs Tango4 support, Raspberry Pi 2 SoC (BCM2836) support. CPUFreq support for the Freescale i.MX7D, Rockchip SMP support for the RK3036, Rockchip RK3228 support, SMP support for the Broadcom Kona and NSP, new additions to the Broadcom NorthStar2, Freescale LS1043a SoC and development board support, and various other DeviceTree changes. Of course, as with most subsystem updates, there is also a fair share of code clean-ups and bug fixes.

8-Way ARM Board Linux Benchmark Comparison From The Pi Zero & ODROID To Tegra

With the big multi-platform ARMv6/ARMv7 work, new Rockchip SoC support, Raspberry Pi 2 SoC support, and more, this is another exciting ARM Linux kernel update coming down the pipe.