Linux 4.8 released, Bootlin contributions

Adelie PenguinLinux 4.8 has been released on Sunday by Linus Torvalds, with numerous new features and improvements that have been described in details on LWN: part 1, part 2 and part 3. KernelNewbies also has an updated page on the 4.8 release. We contributed a total of 153 patches to this release. LWN also published some statistics about this development cycle.

Our most significant contributions:

  • Boris Brezillon improved the Rockchip PWM driver to avoid glitches basing that work on his previous improvement to the PWM subsystem already merged in the kernel. He also fixed a few issues and shortcomings in the pwm regulator driver. This is finishing his work on the Rockchip based Chromebook platforms where a PWM is used for a regulator.
  • While working on the driver for the sii902x HDMI transceiver, Boris Brezillon did a cleanup of many DRM drivers. Those drivers were open coding the encoder selection. This is now done in the core DRM subsystem.
  • On the support of Atmel platforms
    • Alexandre Belloni cleaned up the existing board device trees, removing unused clock definitions and starting to remove warnings when compiling with the Device Tree Compiler (dtc).
  • On the support of Allwinner platforms
    • Maxime Ripard contributed a brand new infrastructure, named sunxi-ng, to manage the clocks of the Allwinner platforms, fixing shortcomings of the Device Tree representation used by the existing implementation. He moved the support of the Allwinner H3 clocks to this new infrastructure.
    • Maxime also developed a driver for the Allwinner A10 Digital Audio controller, bringing audio support to this platform.
    • Boris Brezillon improved the Allwinner NAND controller driver to support DMA assisted operations, which brings a very nice speed-up to throughput on platforms using NAND flashes as the storage, which is the case of Nextthing’s C.H.I.P.
    • Quentin Schulz added support for the Allwinner R16 EVB (Parrot) board.
  • On the support of Marvell platforms
    • Grégory Clément added multiple clock definitions for the Armada 37xx series of SoCs.
    • He also corrected a few issues with the I/O coherency on some Marvell SoCs
    • Romain Perier worked on the Marvell CESA cryptography driver, bringing significant performance improvements, especially for dmcrypt usage. This driver is used on numerous Marvell platforms: Orion, Kirkwood, Armada 370, XP, 375 and 38x.
    • Thomas Petazzoni submitted a driver for the Aardvark PCI host controller present in the Armada 3700, enabling PCI support for this platform.
    • Thomas also added a driver for the new XOR engine found in the Armada 7K and Armada 8K families

Here are in details, the different contributions we made to this release:

Alexandre Belloni

Author: Alexandre Belloni

Alexandre is Bootlin's co-owner and COO. Alexandre joined as a kernel and embedded Linux engineer in 2013, and became co-owner and COO in 2021. More details...

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