NVIDIA Xavier Support Being Brought Up With Linux 4.17, Other New ARM Boards Too

There's a lot of ARM work that has built up for the Linux 4.17 development cycle.

Longtime maintainer Arnd Bergmann sent in the various ARM SoC updates on Thursday night for the Linux 4.17 merge window that's now nearly half-way through. Highlights of these Git pulls include:

- Initial support for the NVIDIA Tegra194, better known as the Xavier SoC. This is the latest NVIDIA SoC and contains eight custom ARMv8 "Carmel" cores, a Volta-based GPU with 512 CUDA cores, a Tensor Processing Unit / Deep Learning Accelerator, an is manufactured on a 12nm FinFET process. It's quite a high-performance SoC intended for self-driving vehicles, among other platform. With Linux 4.17 there is initial support for the NVIDIA Tegra Xavier, but features like the Volta GPU support aren't yet open-source/upstream.

- Along with the Xavier SoC support is handling for the NVIDIA P2972 development board and P2888 CPU module.

- The Nuvoton NPCM, an older ARM9 core based design, is now supported by the mainline Linux kernel. This NPCM is used as a BMC (Baseboard Management Controller).

- The ARM SCMI framework has been added, which allows for power management in a platform independent manner. Hopefully this ARM standard will become adopted by all major players to allow for better ARM Linux power management.

- Allwinner H6 SoC support with the Pine H64 board. The H6 is powered by four Cortex-A53 cores and Mali-T720 MP2 GPU.

- ASpeed platform support for running on the BMC of Qualcomm's Centriq 2400 series server platform.

- Samsung Exynos4-based Galaxy S3 mobile phone support as well as MSM8974-based Galaxy S5.

- Improved Xilinx Zynq and ZynqMP support.

- Libre Computer Card ROC-RK3328-CC developer board support, powered by the Rockchip RK3328 SoC.

- Some other ARM boards now supported include the OrangePi Zero+, Teres-I laptop, Olimex som204, Banana Pi M2 Zero.

The ARM SoC pull request can be viewed here.