Linux 4.17 released, Bootlin contributions

4.17 was released last Sunday, so it’s time for our highlight article to see daylight.

As always, LWN.net did an interesting coverage of this release cycle merge window, highlighting the most important changes: the first half of the 4.17 merge window and the rest of the 4.17 merge window. For 4.17 only, Bootlin contributed a total of 331 patches, which puts us at the 10th place in the ranking of most contributing companies according to both LWN and KPS.

Also according to LWN statistics, Bootlin’s engineer Alexandre Belloni is the 6th most active developer in terms of changesets for this release with a total of 124 commits, almost a percent of the total number.

The main highlights of our contributions are:

For Marvell platforms:
- Antoine Ténart improved the inside-secure crypto accelerator driver by adding support for hmac(sha256) and hmac(sha224) algorithms. This driver is used on Marvell Armada 3700 and 7K/8K.
- Antoine Ténart and Gregory Clement also contributed a number of fixes to the inside-secure crypto accelerator driver,
- Maxime Chevallier added hardware offloading support for VLAN filtering to the mvpp2 network driver. This driver is used on Marvell Armada 375 and 7K/8K.
- Maxime Chevallier also contributed a number of fixes to the mvpp2 network driver,
- Miquèl Raynal migrated boards from PXA3xx NAND driver to the NAND driver he developed and got merged in 4.16,
- Gregory Clement contributed a rework of the clocks representation on Marvell Armada 7K/8K that led to the updates of several Device Trees,
In the MTD subsystem, both Boris Brezillon and Miquèl Raynal contributed numerous fixes,
For Microsemi Ocelot platforms:
- Alexandre Belloni added support for Microsemi Ocelot SoC’s reset,
- Alexandre Belloni added support for Microsemi Ocelot SoC’s interrupt controller,
- Alexandre Belloni added basic support for Microsemi Ocelot: core support, SoC Device Tree and board Device Tree. Alexandre is therefore the maintainer of the Microsemi Ocelot support.
For RaspberryPi platforms, Boris Brezillon contributed the exposing of performance counters of VC4 DRM driver to userspace and numerous fixes to VC4 DRM driver,
For Allwinner platforms:
- Quentin Schulz added support for ADC and battery power supply on the X-Powers AXP813 PMIC,
- Quentin Schulz also contributed support for cpufreq for the Allwinner A83T,
- Maxime Ripard added support for YUV planes in the DRM driver of Allwinner SoCs,
- Maxime Ripard contributed a few fixes and improvements to the DRM driver of Allwinner SoCs,
- Maxime Ripard also contributed a few improvements to the MMC core to be able to comply with Allwinner guidelines,
For RTC subsystem, Alexandre Belloni moved rtc_nvmem_register() out of the core so drivers can better fine-grain tune their initialization, and fixed a few issues along the way (most notably a possible race condition),
For the SuperH architecture, Thomas Petazzoni contributed a few fixes for the PCIe controller of the Renesas SH7786
For the ASoC subsystem, Mylène Josserand added support for the TI PCM1789 DAC,

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 97 patches from other contributors
Boris Brezillon, as the MTD/NAND maintainer, merged 87 patches from other contributors
Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC maintainer and Atmel platform co-maintainer, merged 46 patches from other contributors
Grégory Clement, as the Marvell EBU co-maintainer, merged 14 patches from other contributors

Here is the commit by commit detail of our contributions to 4.17:

Author: Quentin Schulz

Quentin Schulz was an engineer at Bootlin between 2016 and 2018. See https://bootlin.com/company/staff/quentin-schulz/ for details. View all posts by Quentin Schulz

Author: Quentin Schulz

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