RISC-V With Linux 5.12 Begins Mainlining SiFive's FU740 Support, NUMA

The Linux 5.12 merge window is drawing to a close this weekend while being sent in this morning were the RISC-V updates that tend to excite the free software enthusiasts.

Notable with RISC-V in Linux 5.12 is initial support for the SiFive FU740, the SoC design announced at the end of last year. The most notable major user coming to market at the moment with the FU740 is the HiFive Unmatched development board. The SoC with its quad-core U74-MC and single S7 embedded core is joined by four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, PCI Express x16 (at x8 speeds), NVMe M.2, Gigabit Ethernet, and 16GB of RAM to make for the most interesting RISC-V development board to date. The HiFive Unmatched is slated to still begin shipping later this quarter for about $665 USD.

Not only is the Linux 5.12 kernel bringing preliminary SiFive FU740 SoC support but there is also the early work on the HiFive Unmatched SBC support being upstreamed too. It's great seeing this early support mainline arrive ahead of the hardware beginning to ship to customers.

Also notable with this RISC-V support is wiring up NUMA support for RISC-V, support for Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASAN) on the VMALLOC region, new drivers for the Kendryte K210, and preliminary support for kernels larger than 128MiB. There are also a variety of other low-level improvements too part of this pull.