Two weeks ago, we submitted the initial support for the Marvell Armada 3700, which was the first ARM64 platform that Bootlin engineers contributed to the upstream Linux kernel.
Today, we submitted initial support for another Marvell ARM64 platform, the Armada 7K and Armada 8K platform. Compared to the Armada 3700, the Armada 7K and 8K are much more on the high-end side: they use a dual Cortex-A72 or a quad Cortex-A72, as opposed to the Cortex-A53 for the Armada 3700.
The Armada 7K and 8K also use a fairly unique architecture, internally they are composed of several components:
- One AP (Application Processor), which contains the processor itself and a few core hardware blocks. The AP used in the Armada 7K and 8K is called AP806, and is available in two configurations: dual Cortex-A72 and quad Cortex-A72.
- One or two CP (Communication Processor), which contain most of the I/O interfaces (SATA, PCIe, Ethernet, etc.). The 7K family chips have one CP, while the 8K family chips integrate two CPs, providing two times the number of I/O interfaces available in the CP. The CP used in the 7K and 8K is called CP110.
All in all, this gives the following combinations:
- Armada 7020, which is a dual Cortex-A72 with one CP
- Armada 7040, which is a quad Cortex-A72 with one CP
- Armada 8020, which is a dual Cortex-A72 with two CPs
- Armada 8040, which is a quad Cortex-A72 with two CPs
So far, we submitted initial support only for the AP806 part of the chip, with the following patch series:
- [PATCH 0/3] clk: mvebu: initial support for AP806 clocks, adding two new clock drivers for the main clocks of the AP806
- [PATCH] irqchip: irq-mvebu-odmi: new driver, adding a new irqchip driver to control a MSI controller that can be used by on-board devices
- [PATCH] dma: mv_xor_v2: new driver, adding a new dmaengine driver to accelerate copy and XOR operations, used mainly for RAID5
- [PATCH 0/5] arm64: Initial support for Marvell Armada 7K/8K, adding the initial support for the platform itself, with mainly the Device Tree files
We will continue to submit more and more patches to support other features of the Armada 7K and 8K processors in the near future.
