Linux 4.14 released, Bootlin contributions

Penguin from Mylène Josserand
Drawing from Mylène Josserand,
based on a picture from Samuel Blanc under CC-BY-SA
Linux 4.14, which is going to become the next Long Term Supported version, has been released a week ago by Linus Torvalds. As usual, LWN.net did an interesting coverage of this release cycle merge window, highlighting the most important changes: The first half of the 4.14 merge window and The rest of the 4.14 merge window.

According to Linux Kernel Patch statistics, Bootlin contributed 111 patches to this release, making it the 24th contributing company by number of commits: a somewhat lower than usual contribution level from our side. At least, Bootlin cannot be blamed for trying to push more code into 4.14 because of its Long Term Support nature! 🙂

The main highlights of our contributions are:

  • On the RTC subsystem, Alexandre Belloni made as usual a number of fixes and improvements to various drivers, especially the ds1307 driver.
  • On the NAND subsystem, Boris Brezillon did a number of small improvements in various areas.
  • On the support for Marvell platforms
    • Antoine Ténart improved the ppv2 network driver used by the Marvell Armada 7K/8K SoCs: support for 10G speed and TSO support are the main highlights. In order to support 10G speed, Antoine added a driver in drivers/phy/ to configure the common PHYs in the Armada 7K/8K SoCs.
    • Thomas Petazzoni also improved the ppv2 network driver by adding support for TX interrupts and per-CPU RX interrupts.
    • Grégory Clement contributed some patches to enable NAND support on Armada 7K/8K, as well as a number of fixes in different areas (GPIO fix, clock handling fixes, etc.)
    • Miquèl Raynal contributed a fix for the Armada 3700 SPI controller driver.
  • On the support for Allwinner platforms
    • Maxime Ripard contributed the support for a new board, the BananaPI M2-Magic. Maxime also contributed a few fixes to the Allwinner DRM driver, and a few other misc fixes (clock, MMC, RTC, etc.).
    • Quentin Schulz contributed the support for the power button functionality of the AXP221 (PMIC used in several Allwinner platforms)
  • On the support for Atmel platforms, Quentin Schulz improved the clock drivers for this platform to properly support the Audio PLL, which allowed to fix the Atmel audio drivers. He also fixed suspend/resume support in the Atmel MMC driver to support the deep sleep mode of the SAMA5D2 processor.

In addition to making direct contributions, Bootlin is also involved in the Linux kernel development by having a number of its engineers act as Linux kernel maintainers. As part of this effort, Bootlin engineers have reviewed, merged and sent pull requests for a large number of contributions from other developers:

  • Boris Brezillon, as the NAND subsystem maintainer and MTD subsystem co-maintainer, merged 68 patches from other developers.
  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC subsystem maintainer and Atmel ARM platform co-maintainer, merged 32 patches from other developers.
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell ARM platform co-maintainer, merged 29 patches from other developers.
  • Maxime Ripard, as the Allwinner ARM platform co-maintainer, merged 18 patches from other developers.

This flow of patches from kernel maintainers to other kernel maintainers is also nicely described for the 4.14 release by the Patch flow into the mainline for 4.14 LWN.net article.

The detailed list of our contributions:

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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