Linux 5.9 Adds Intel "Keem Bay" Support, 8 Snapdragon Smartphones, AMD EthanolX BMC, Old Tegra Tablets

Written by Michael Larabel in Arm on 4 August 2020 at 03:39 AM EDT. 2 Comments
ARM
There are many ARM changes coming to Linux 5.9, including support for Intel's Keem Bay.

Keem Bay is the Intel SoC by way of their Movidius acquisition that is built for edge AI computing. Keem Bay is a SoC built with Arm Cortex A53 processors and an Intel Movidius VPU. Intel acquired Movidius in 2016 and has continued advancing their low-power, computer vision hardware. Intel published a DRM driver for Keem Bay and other driver changes while the pull request being talked about today is the actual ARM platform enablement.

Along with Keem Bay, new Arm SoC families being supported by the mainline Linux 5.9 kernel are Microchip SparX5 and Mediatek Infinity3 / Mercury5.

Furthermore with the ARM updates, eight more Snapdragon powered phones are capable of running with Linux 5.9 plus two more NVIDIA Tegra tablets. A lot of this mainline kernel work is coming via a PostmarketOS developer now that there is good open-source Arm/Qualcomm driver support and the like in mainline.

Other ARM hardware highlights for Linux 5.9 include:

- Amazon's Alpine v3 16-core Cortex-A72 SoC from Annapurna Labs is also now supported by the mainline kernel. This is the first-generation Graviton part.

- Of the new Snapdragon products enabled, the Android-based smartphones from Sony including the Xperia 10, 10 Plus, XA2, XA2 Plus and XA2 Ultra are now supported. Other devices include the Xiaomi Libra Mi 4C and Microsoft Lumia 950.

- Support for the Renesas RZ/G2H models.

- Support for revision 1.2 of the Pine64 PinePhone.

- Support for the ASpeed BMC controller in AMD's "EthanolX" EPYC data center (Rome) reference platform based on the ASpeed AST2500.

- Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 10.1-inch support as a new Mediatek MT8183 based Chromebook.

- The ASUS Google Nexus 7 and Acer Iconia Tab A500 tablets powered by NVIDIA Tegra are now working on the mainline kernel at least.

It's quite a hearty set of ARM SoC and platform updates for Linux 5.9. This set of PRs has more details on all of the changes in full.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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