Linux 5.1 released, Bootlin contributions

LinuxLinux 5.1 was released a a few days ago by Linus Torvalds. As usual, LWN covered the major new features of this release by looking at what got merged during the merge window: part 1 and part 2. KernelNewbies also has a nice summary.

Bootlin contributed 181 commits to this release, making us the 14th contributing company by number of commits. Taking the entire Git history of the kernel, Bootlin has contributed a total of 6256 patches, making us the 15th contributing company by number of commits: a demonstration of our long-term involvement in the upstream Linux kernel community.

For Linux 5.1, our significant contributions have been:

  • In the RTC subsystem
    • Alexandre Belloni contributed a new RTC driver for the RV3028 RTC
    • Alexandre Belloni, as the maintainer of the RTC subsystem, continued to contribute a number of fixes/improvements in various RTC drivers
  • As part of a customer project in which we ported a modern U-Boot and Linux to a custom NXP LPC3250 platform, Alexandre Belloni contributed a fix for the LPC3250 serial port driver, and Grégory Clement moved the LPC3250 Analog-to-Digital converter Device Tree binding out of staging. We have other patches/fixes related to LPC3250 in the pipeline.
  • In the support for Marvell platforms
    • Antoine Ténart contributed numerous improvements to the mvpp2 driver, especially to properly handle the reset state of the different hardware blocks depending on how a particular Ethernet port is configured.
    • Grégory Clement contributed a new cpufreq driver to support CPU frequency scaling on Marvell Armada 8K
    • Maxime Chevallier contributed numerous improvements to the marvell10g Ethernet PHY driver, mainly to support 2.5G and 5G speeds, and to support the 88E2110 PHY. He also enabled 2.5G support in the mvpp2 Ethernet MAC driver.
    • Miquèl Raynal continued his work to bring suspend/resume support to the Armada 37xx platform: he added support for the Armada 37xx COMPHY and Armada 37xx USB UTMI PHY, added suspend/resume in ehci-orion, improved the USB core code to use the generic PHY API, and did a number of related Device Tree changes.
  • In the support for RaspberryPi platforms
    • Boris Brezillon made some fixes in the vc4 display controller driver: support for X/Y reflection was added, negative X/Y positioning was fixed, and support for margins on HDMI displays was added.
  • In the support for Allwinner platforms
    • Maxime Ripard made a number of small improvements to the Allwinner display controller driver
    • Paul Kocialkowski contributed a number of improvements to the support of YUV planes in the Allwinner display controller driver, in relation to our work on the Allwinner VPU support.
    • Paul Kocialkowski contributed some Device Tree changes to enable the Allwinner VPU on Allwinner A10, as well as a few fixes for the Allwinner VPU driver itself.
    • As listed below, Boris Brezillon converted the Allwinner NAND controller driver to the exec_op interface.
  • After extending the generic PHY subsystem in Linux 5.0 with two new hooks phy_configure() and phy_validate(), Maxime Ripard used this extension to add a driver for the Cadence D-PHY (used in combination with Cadence MIPI DSI and CSI transceivers), to convert the Allwinner A31 DSI D-PHY handling to the generic PHY subsystem, and converted the Cadence DSI driver to use the generic PHY API.
  • In the MTD subsystem
    • The NAND controller driver for Allwinner platform was converted to the use the new exec_op interface by Boris Brezillon.
  • In the GPIO subsystem
    • Thomas Petazzoni added support in the core GPIO subsystem to enable pull-up/pull-down resistors available in some GPIO controllers. It was contributed together with an implementation for the PCA953x family of I2C GPIO expanders.

In addition to writing code and submitting patches, a number of Bootlin engineers are also maintainers of various areas in the Linux kernel. As part of their maintainer duties, they review and merge patches from other developers:

  • Maxime Ripard, as the Allwinner platform maintainer, merged 76 patches from other developers
  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC subsystem maintainer and Atmel/Microchip platform co-maintainer, merged 53 patches from other developers
  • Miquèl Raynal, as the NAND subsystem maintainer, merged 38 patches from other developers
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell platform maintainer, merged 18 patches from other developers

And finally, here is as usual the detailed list of each patch we contributed:

Thomas Petazzoni

Author: Thomas Petazzoni

Thomas Petazzoni is Bootlin's co-owner and CEO. Thomas joined Bootlin in 2008 as a kernel and embedded Linux engineer, became CTO in 2013, and co-owner/CEO in 2021. More details...

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