Linux 5.3 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Penguin from Mylène Josserand
Drawing from Mylène Josserand, based on a picture from Samuel Blanc (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Manchot_royal_-_King_Penguin.jpg)
The 5.3 version of the Linux kernel was released recently. As usual, we recommend our readers to look at the LWN coverage for this release merge window: part 1 and part 2. Together with the KernelNewbies page, these articles give a very nice overview of the major features and improvements of this new release.

For this release, Bootlin is the 16th contributing company by number of commits, with 143 patches merged in the Linux kernel. Our significant contributions this time were:

  • Support for Allwinner processors
    • The support for H264 video decoding, from Maxime Ripard, was finally merged in the cedrus VPU driver that we have developed thanks to the funding of our Kickstarter campaign last year. The last missing piece is H265 video decoding, which we have submitted several times and we hope to get merged soon.
  • Support for Marvell platforms
    • Antoine Ténart contributed a number of bug fixes and updates to the inside-secure crypto driver, which is used for the cryptographic hardware accelerator found on Marvell Armada 3700 and Marvell Armada 7K/8K.
    • Maxime Chevallier contributed many improvements to the mvpp2 network driver, used on the Marvell Armada 375 and Armada 7K/8K systems. His patches improve the traffic classification offloading capabilities, a topic he will present in detail at the next Embedded Linux Conference Europe.
    • Miquèl Raynal added PHY support for the PCIe Armada 8K driver, and adjusted a few things in the Marvell Armada 7K/8K Device Tree files.
  • Support for Microchip MPU (formerly Atmel) platforms
    • Alexandre Belloni converted the remaining SoCs (SAM9x5, SAM9G45, SAM9RL and SAMA5D3) to the new slow clock controller bindings.
    • Antoine Ténart contributed a few small improvements to the macb driver, for the Cadence network controller used on Microchip platforms.
  • Maxime Ripard contributed numerous YAML Device Tree schemas, to help the effort of converting many Device Tree bindings to the new YAML format, which can be used to validate Device Trees against their bindings.
  • Maxime Ripard contributed numerous patches to the core DRM subsystem: a complete rewrite of the command line parser that parses the DRM-related options of the kernel command line, and support for new options. This was done as part of an effort to make sure the upstream Linux kernel can support all the possible options that the downstream RaspberryPi kernel+firmware combination provides to configure the display.
  • Paul Kocialkowski contributed a few improvements to the RaspberryPi vc4 display controller driver, related to buffer allocation.

Also, several of Bootlin engineers are also kernel maintainers, so they review and merge patches from other contributors:

  • Miquèl Raynal as the NAND subsystem maintainer and MTD subsystem co-maintainer, reviewed and merged 51 patches from other contributors
  • Maxime Ripard as the Allwinner platform co-maintainer, reviewed and merged 38 patches from other contributors
  • Alexandre Belloni as the RTC maintainer and Microchip platform co-maintainer, reviewed and merged 36 patches from other contributors
  • Grégory Clement as the Marvell EBU platform co-maintainer, reviewed and merged 9 patches from other contributors

Here is the details of all our contributions, patch by patch:

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...

4 thoughts on “Linux 5.3 released, Bootlin contributions inside”

  1. Hi, thank you very much for cedrus driver implementation.
    When do you think you’ll deliver H.264 full decoding profiles? Currently only H.264 base profile is supported. Main and High profiles would be even more interesting.

    1. Hello fguerzoni, thanks for your comment! We currently to not have the funding to implement H264 decoding for main and high profiles. We are still working on upstreaming the H265 decoding support as this was a goal of our Kickstarter campaign, but improving the state of H264 decoding support is not planned at the moment. If there are companies interested in such features, we will definitely be happy to offer our engineering services to implement what’s missing.

      1. Thank you for reply.
        I really believed that full H.264 decoding profile was ready on your side and it was just a matter of merging to the kernel.

        1. Hi fguerzoni. Indeed, the current cedrus code is not yet ready to support high-profile H.264 videos, extra work is required for that. What we have merged in Linux at this point is a staging implementation that still needs improvements and reworks before we can consider it feature-complete and stable. Things have been happening though and the situation is slowly improving over time. But of course, the best way for us to finish the work would be the get funding from a client for that!

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