It's About Time: MIPS Release 5 + Warrior P5600 Support Coming With Linux 5.8

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 23 May 2020 at 03:14 AM EDT. 11 Comments
HARDWARE
While MIPS Release 6 is the latest version of the MIPS ISA, the MIPS Release 5 support is finally set to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel cycle.

The MIPS R5 ISA was announced in 2012 with SIMD and virtualization capabilities among other improvements with hardware appearing after 2013. Now finally MIPS Release 5 and now finally the Release 5 changes are going to be supported by the mainline Linux kernel. This support is coming thanks to Russia's Baikal Electronics.

Beyond that MIPS Release 5 support finally for the mainline Linux kernel, also queued is now MIPS Warrior P5600 support for that MIPS Release 5 processor. The MIPS Warrior P5600 has been around since 2013 and again finally seeing proper mainline support now thanks to Baikal Electronics.

That R5 support and other improvements are on deck for the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel merge window as part of the MIPS tree changes.

MIPS is quickly losing ground to Arm and RISC-V for embedded processors. The once promising open-source MIPS Processor ISA effort ended shortly after that announcement was made and since then there hasn't been much to report on the MIPS CPU front while other MIPS CPUs more recent than the P5600 still have yet to be supported by the mainline Linux kernel.
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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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