Linux 4.6 released, with Bootlin contributions

Adelie PenguinThe 4.6 version of the Linux kernel was released last Sunday by Linus Torvalds. As usual, LWN.net had a very nice coverage of this development cycle merge window, highlighting the most significant changes and improvements: part 1, part 2 and part 3. KernelNewbies is now active again, and has a very detailed page about this release.

On a total of 13517 non-merge commits, Bootlin contributed for this release a total of 107 non-merge commits, a number slightly lower than our past contributions for previous kernel releases. That being said, there are still a few interesting contributions in those 107 patches. We are particular happy to see patches from all our eight engineers in this release, including from Mylène Josserand and Romain Perier, who just joined us mid-March! We also already have 194 patches lined-up for the next 4.7 release.

Here are the highlights of our contributions to the 4.6 release:

  • Atmel ARM processors support
    • Alexandre Belloni and Boris Brezillon contributed a number of patches to improve and cleanup the support for the PMC (Power Management and Clocks) hardware block. As expected, this involved patching both clock drivers and power management code for the Atmel platforms.
  • Annapurna Labs Alpine platforms support
    • As a newly appointed maintainer of the Annapurna Labs ARM/ARM64 Alpine platforms, Antoine Ténart contributed the base support for the ARM64 Alpine v2 platform: base platform support and Device Tree, and an interrupt controller driver to support MSI-X
  • Marvell ARM processors support
    • Grégory Clement added initial support for the Armada 3700, a new Cortex-A53 based ARM64 SoC from Marvell, as well as a first development board using this SoC. So far, the supported features are: UART, USB and SATA (as well as of course timers and interrupts).
    • Thomas Petazzoni added initial support for the Armada 7K/8K, a new Cortex-A72 based ARM64 SoC from Marvell, as well as a first development board using this SoC. So far, UART, I2C, SPI are supported. However, due to the lack of clock drivers, this initial support can’t be booted yet, the clock drivers and additional support is on its way to 4.7.
    • Thomas Petazzoni contributed an interrupt controller driver for the ODMI interrupt controller found in the Armada 7K/8K SoC.
    • Grégory Clement and Thomas Petazzoni did a few improvements to the support of Armada 38x. Thomas added support for the NAND flash used on Armada 370 DB and Armada XP DB.
    • Boris Brezillon contributed a number of fixes to the Marvell CESA driver, which is used to control the cryptographic engine found in most Marvell EBU processors.
    • Thomas Petazzoni contributed improvements to the irq-armada-370-xp interrupt controller driver, to use the new generic MSI infrastructure.
  • Allwinner ARM processors support
    • Maxime Ripard contributed a few improvements to Allwinner clock drivers, and a few other fixes.
  • MTD and NAND flash subsystem
    • As a maintainer of the NAND subsystem, Boris Brezillon did a number of contributions in this area. Most notably, he added support for the randomizer feature to the Allwinner NAND driver as well as related core NAND subsystem changes. This change is needed to support MLC NANDs on Allwinner platforms. He also contributed several patches to continue clean up and improve the NAND subsystem.
    • Thomas Petazzoni fixed an issue in the pxa3xx_nand driver used on Marvell EBU platforms that prevented using some of the ECC configurations (such as 8 bits BCH ECC on 4 KB pages). He also contributed minor improvements to the generic NAND code.
  • Networking subsystem
    • Grégory Clement contributed an extension to the core networking subsystem that allows to take advantage of hardware capable of doing HW-controlled buffer management. This new extension is used by the mvneta network driver, useful for several Marvell EBU platforms. We expect to extend this mechanism further in the future, in order to take advantage of additional hardware capabilities.
  • RTC subsystem
    • As a maintainer of the RTC subsystem, Alexandre Belloni did a number of fixes and improvements in various RTC drivers.
    • Mylène Josserand contributed a few improvements to the abx80x RTC driver.
  • Altera NIOSII support
    • Romain Perier contributed two patches to fix issues in the kernel running on the Altera NIOSII architecture. The first one, covered in a previous blog post, fixed the NIOSII-specific memset() implementation. The other patch fixes a problem in the generic futex code.

In addition, several our of engineers are maintainers of various platforms or subsystems, so they do a lot of work reviewing and merging the contributions from other kernel developers. This effort can be measured by looking at the number of patches on which they Signed-off-by, but for which they are not the author. Here are the number of patches that our engineered Signed-off-by, but for which they were not the author:

  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC subsystem maintainer and the Atmel ARM co-maintainer: 91 patches
  • Maxime Ripard, as the Allwinner ARM co-maintainer: 65 patches
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell EBU ARM co-maintainer: 45 patches
  • Thomas Petazzoni, simply resubmitting patches from others: 2 patches

Here is the detailed list of our contributions to the 4.6 kernel release:

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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