More Arm SoCs, Smartphones & NVIDIA Control Backbone Bus Enabled With Linux 6.1

The Arm SoC and platform enablement pull requests were sent out this morning that provide the Linux 6.1 kernel with support for several new SoCs, various platforms including some newer smartphones, and other hardware support improvements.

There are several new SoCs this round including for the Mediatek MT8186. But notably absent still from the mainline Linux 6.1 kernel is no upstream support yet for the Apple M1 Ultra SoC. The Apple M1 Ultra support continues to be worked on and can be used with the downstream Asahi Linux builds. The AMD Pensando Elba SoC bring-up is also near the finish line but didn't make it for Linux 6.1. There is also several more smartphones working with the mainline kernel now, including the PinePhone Pro.

- New SoCs supported by Linux 6.1 include the Mediatek MT8186 as a Chromebook/tablet-focused SoC, the TI AM62A that is part of the K3 family, NXP i.MX8DXL as another member of the i.MX8 family, and Qualcomm IPQ8064-v2.0 / IPQ8062 / IPQ8065 SoCs as IPQ8064 variants.

- Several new smartphones can run off the mainline Linux 6.1 kernel including the Sony Xperia 1 IV and Samsung Galaxy E5 / E7 / Grand Max.

- The PINE64 PinePhone Pro also now works off the mainline Linux 6.1 kernel as a notable mention.

- Various developer/reference boards for other SoCs are also now enabled with Linux 6.1.

- Two notable server platforms with the ASpeed AST2600 BMC are now supported: AMD's DaytonaX reference platform for Milan-X and the Ampere Mt Mitchell.

- A new driver for error handling on the NVIDIA Tegra Control Backbone Bus "CBB". This NVIDIA Control backbone Bus 2.0 driver is for the NVIDIA Grace CPU (Tegra241) as well as the Jetson AGX Orin (Tegra234). There is also a CBB 1.0 driver as part of this pull request for the Xavier (Tegra194) SoC.

- A new driver for Qualcomm LLCC/DDR memory bandwidth measurement.

- Enabling more Qualcomm drivers as part of the default kernel configurations.

See this pull series for more details on all of the Arm SoC/platform changes coming with Linux 6.1.