Linux 4.13 released, Bootlin contributions

Linux 4.13 was released last Sunday by Linus Torvalds, and the major new features of this release were described in details by LWN in a set of articles: part 1 and part 2.

This release gathers 13006 non-merge commits, amongst which 239 were made by Bootlin engineers. According to the LWN article on 4.13 statistics, this makes Bootlin the 13th contributing company by number of commits, the 10th by lines changed.

The most important contributions from Bootlin for this release have been:

  • In the RTC subsystem
    • Alexandre Belloni introduced a new method for registering RTC devices, with one step for the allocation, and one step for the registration itself, which allows to solve race conditions in a number of drivers.
    • Alexandre Belloni added support for exposing the non-volatile memory found in some RTC devices through the Linux kernel nvmem framework, making them usable from userspace. A few drivers were changed to use this new mechanism.
  • In the MTD/NAND subsystem
    • Boris Brezillon did a large number of fixes and minor improvements in the NAND subsystem, both in the core and in a few drivers.
    • Thomas Petazzoni contributed the support for on-die ECC, specifically with Micron NANDs. This allows to use the ECC calculation capabilities of the NAND chip itself, as opposed to using software ECC (calculated by the CPU) or ECC done by the NAND controller.
    • Thomas Petazzoni contributed a few improvements to the FSMC NAND driver, used on ST Spear platforms. The main improvement is to support the ->setup_data_interface() callback, which allows to configure optimal timings in the NAND controller.
  • Support for Allwinner ARM platforms
    • Alexandre Belloni improved the sun4i PWM driver to use the so-called atomic API and support hardware read out.
    • Antoine Ténart improved the sun4i-ss cryptographic engine driver to support the Allwinner A13 processor, in addition to the already supported A10.
    • Maxime Ripard contributed HDMI support for the Allwinner A10 processor (in the DRM subsystem) and a number of related changes to the Allwinner clock support.
    • Quentin Schulz improved the support for battery charging through the AXP20x PMIC, used on Allwinner platforms.
  • Support for Atmel ARM platforms
    • Alexandre Belloni added suspend/resume support for the Atmel SAMA5D2 clock driver. This is part of a larger effort to implement the backup mode for the SAMA5D2 processor.
    • Alexandre Belloni added suspend/resume support in the tcb_clksrc driver, used as for clocksource and clockevents on Atmel SAMA5D2.
    • Alexandre Belloni cleaned up a number of drivers, removing support for non-DT probing, which is possible now that the AVR32 architecture has been dropped. Indeed, the AVR32 processors used to share the same drivers as the Atmel ARM processors.
    • Alexandre Belloni added the core support for the backup mode on Atmel SAMA5D2, a suspend/resume state with significant power savings.
    • Boris Brezillon switched Atmel platforms to use the new binding for the EBI and NAND controllers.
    • Boris Brezillon added support for timing configuration in the Atmel NAND driver.
    • Quentin Schulz added suspend/resume support to the Bosch m_can driver, used on Atmel platforms.
  • Support for Marvell ARM platforms
    • Antoine Ténart contributed a completely new driver (3200+ lines of code) for the Inside Secure EIP197 cryptographic engine, used in the Marvell Armada 7K and 8K processors. He also subsequently contributed a number of fixes and improvements for this driver.
    • Antoine Ténart improved the existing mvmdio driver, used to communicate with Ethernet PHYs over MDIO on Marvell platforms to support the XSMI variant found on Marvell Armada 7K/8K, used to communicate with 10G capable PHYs.
    • Antoine Ténart contributed minimal support for 10G Ethernet in the mvpp2 driver, used on Marvell Armada 7K/8K. For now, the driver still relies on low-level initialization done by the bootloader, but additional changes in 4.14 and 4.15 will remove this limitation.
    • Grégory Clement added a new pinctrl driver to configure the pin-muxing on the Marvell Armada 37xx processors.
    • Grégory Clement did a large number of changes to the clock drivers used on the Marvell Armada 7K/8K processors to prepare the addition of pinctrl support.
    • Grégory Clement added support for Marvell Armada 7K/8K to the existing mvebu-gpio driver.
    • Thomas Petazzoni added support for the ICU, a specialized interrupt controller used on the Marvell Armada 7K/8K, for all devices located in the CP110 part of the processor.
    • Thomas Petazzoni removed a work-around to properly resume per-CPU interrupts on the older Marvell Armada 370/XP platforms.
  • Support for RaspberryPi platforms
    • Boris Brezillon added runtime PM support to the HDMI encoder driver used on RaspberryPi platforms, and contributed a few other fixes to the VC4 DRM driver.

It is worth mentioning that Miquèl Raynal, recently hired by Bootlin, sees his first kernel patch merged: nand: fix wrong default oob layout for small pages using soft ecc.

Bootlin engineers are not only contributors, but also maintainers of various subsystems in the Linux kernel, which means they are involved in the process of reviewing, discussing and merging patches contributed to those subsystems:

  • Maxime Ripard, as the Allwinner platform co-maintainer, merged 113 patches from other contributors
  • Boris Brezillon, as the MTD/NAND maintainer, merged 62 patches from other contributors
  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC maintainer and Atmel platform co-maintainer, merged 57 patches from other contributors
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell EBU co-maintainer, merged 47 patches from other contributors

Here is the commit by commit detail of our contributors to 4.13:

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...

One thought on “Linux 4.13 released, Bootlin contributions”

  1. I always read the update posts and rarely see any comments, so I’d just like to say thank you guys for your awesome work in Linux, Buildroot and Free Software in general. Cheers!

    Reply

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