ARM Support Will Change A Lot With Linux 3.10

Written by Michael Larabel in Arm on 2 May 2013 at 06:11 PM EDT. 5 Comments
ARM
In addition to improved 64-bit ARM support with the Linux 3.10 kernel, ARM architecture support in general will improve a lot with this in-development kernel release.

As Olof Johansson explains in his pull request series, "we have a relatively large merge window in front of us for arm-soc." Due to the large size, the ARM Linux pull request for the Linux 3.10 kernel was split into three patches. The highlights of the ARM Linux changes include:

- Support for the ARM Cortex-A5 Atmel SAMA5D3.

- Support for the CSR SiRFatlas6 SoC.

- Updates to NVIDIA's Tegra 4 platform.

- Improved ARM Linux multi-platform support. The multi-platform support allows for a single Linux kernel image to support multiple ARM SoC targets. Since the unification and introduction in earlier Linux kernel releases, the newly-supported SoCs for this feature include: Broadcom BCM2835, CNS3XXX, Sirf, Nomadik, MSX, Spear, NVIDIA Tegra, and UX500. Olof notes, "We're getting close to having most of them converted!" This is in regards to most all major ARM platforms being covered now by a single ARM Linux kernel image!

- Device-Tree updates.

- Various other ARM SoC updates for already supported hardware.

Arguably the most important change for ARM with the Linux 3.10 kernel is the expanded multi-platform coverage.
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