Linux Gets Ported To China's 32-bit "C-SKY" CPU Architecture

While the Linux kernel maintainers are currently working on dropping support for some old CPU architectures, a new CPU architecture is looking to receive the mainline treatment.

Hangzhou C-SKY Microsystems is a Chinese producer of CPU IP licenses and a SoC platform. The company has developed their own 32-bit embedded CPU cores for use within cameras, set-top boxes, digital video recorders, printers, and other appliances / industrial devices. C-SKY is a member of the RISC-V Foundation but their current offerings do not appear based on this ISA.

C-SKY Microsystems has posted a set of 19 patches porting the Linux kernel to their CPU architecture. This Linux kernel port includes support for their two ABI versions and goes along with their work on getting the rest of the Linux toolchain working with upstream support on their hardware. There is a uClibc-NG port already for C-SKY while the GCC / Glibc / Binutils / QEMU support is still a work-in-progress.

The company's 4.16-based Linux kernel port to C-SKY comes in at about twelve thousand lines of new code. The code can be found via this patch series but as of writing no upstream Linux kernel developers have commented on the quality or the prospects of C-SKY support going to the mainline kernel.