Linux 3.19 released, overview of Bootlin contributions

It’s been a while that Linus Torvalds has released Linux 3.19 and we already know that the next version of Linux will be called 4.0. It’s not too late though to learn more about the 3.19 release, by reading the following three LWN articles: part 1, part 2 and part 3. KernelNewbies has also updated its page about 3.19.

In terms of statistics for the 3.19 release cycle, LWN has published an article which ranks Bootlin the 13th contributing company, with 205 patches merged. We have been in the top 30th contributing company by number of patches for all kernel releases since Linux 3.8, a sign of our continuous involvement in the upstream kernel community.

Our most important contributions in this kernel release are:

  • For the Atmel ARM processors, numerous cleanup patches from Alexandre Belloni to prepare the platform for ARM multiplatform compliance (the possibility of building the support for Atmel ARM processors together with the support of other ARM processors in a single kernel image). From Boris Brezillon, addition of Device Tree support in the AT91 RTC driver, improvements to the AT91 irqchip driver, addition of a PWM driver for the PWM built into the Atmel HLCDC display controller, addition of Device Tree support for the AT91 hardware random number generator driver, addition of an MFD driver for the Atmel HLCDC display controller, and many other Device Tree fixes and improvements.
  • For the Marvell Berlin ARM processors, addition of USB, SATA and reset controller support. The USB support required numerous core improvements to the USB subsystem, and the addition of a specific USB PHY driver.
  • For the Marvell EBU ARM processors, Gregory Clement added USB PHY support for Armada 375, and CPU hotplug support for Armada 38x as well as several other fixes and improvements. Thomas Petazzoni added suspend to RAM support for Armada XP, fixed a serious problem in the I2C driver that required some major refactoring, and did some HW I/O coherency related fixes.
  • For the Allwinner ARM processors, Maxime Ripard did the relicensing of many Device Tree files from GPL only to GPL+X11 licenses. He also added pinctrl support on Allwinner A80.
  • After writing a dmaengine driver which was merged in 3.17, Maxime Ripard started to get involved in the dmaengine subsystem itself. He contributed a documentation for this subsystem, which was merged in Linux 3.19, as well as several fixes for dmaengine drivers.
  • Addition of a generic linux/media-bus-format.h header file, containing definitions of the various possible pixel formats. This header file was until then specific to the Video4Linux subsystem, but will start being used by the DRM/KMS subsystem. This addition was done in preparation of the introduction of a DRM/KMS driver for the AT91 HLCDC display controller (to come in Linux 4.0).
  • A few small improvements to the core DRM/KMS subsystem, also preparation work for the AT91 HLCDC display controller driver.
  • Fixes for the i.MX28 NAND flash controller driver, the gpmi-nand to properly support the raw access operations, which allow to use the userspace MTD testing utilities to validate the MTD setup. This was part of a customer project we did to assess the quality of the MTD and UBI setup on a Freescale i.MX28 custom platform.

The details of our contributions are:

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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