SLIMbus Framework Revised For The Linux Kernel

Linaro developers have restored work on the SLIMbus patches for the Linux kernel, which have long been dormant.

SLIMbus is the Serial Low-power Inter-chip Media Bus, which is a standard from the MIPI alliance to allow multiple digital audio components to communicate simultaneously and carry multiple audio streams of differing sample rates and bit widths.

The SLIMbus specification has been around for one decade and used by different hardware, but has yet to see a proper framework for it within the mainline Linux kernel. Patches for this SLIMbus framework for Linux have floated around from time to time, but never hit the stage of being actually merged, but Linaro seems to be working on getting it to master.

They are revising the SLIMbus work now in order to get the Qualcomm DSP audio working with the mainline kernel, with SLIMbus being important in particular to Qualcomm SoCs.

Linaro's revised SLIMbus framework kernel patches amount to about three thousand lines of new code (including in that is the new slim-qcom-ctrl driver) and can be found on the kernel mailing list.