Linux 5.5 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 5.5 was recently released, as usual bringing a large number of new features and improvements, which are nicely detailed in the LWN articles on merge window part 1 and merge window part 2, but also on the Kernelnewbies wiki.

According to the statistics, a total of 14350 changes were made to this kernel release, to which Bootlin contributed 124 patches, making us the 19th contributing company by number of commits. Here are the highlights of our contributions:

  • By far and large our most important achievement in Linux 5.5 is the merge of the H265 decoding support in the Allwinner VPU driver, developed by Paul Kocialkowski. This was the last missing feature to complete the effort funded by the Kickstarter campaign we launched in February 2018. See our blog post wrapping up the Allwinner VPU work.
  • Alexandre Belloni as the RTC subsystem maintainer, as usual contributed a large number of RTC driver improvements and fixes.
  • Antoine Ténart contributed some improvements to the Cadence MACB driver, most notably used as the Ethernet controller driver on Microchip/Atmel platforms. The main improvement is the conversion to the phylink subsystem for the interaction with the Ethernet PHY.
  • Grégory Clement contributed numerous enhancements to the Microchip/Atmel SPI controller driver, mainly aimed at fixing and improving the support for Chip Select, both native Chip Selects and GPIO-based Chip Selects.
  • Kamel Bouhara contributed a few additional Device Tree files to describe home automation hardware platforms from Overkiz, based on the Microchip SAMA5D2 processor, as well as an improvement to a Microchip SoC driver that allows to expose the platform serial number to user-space.
  • Miquèl Raynal added support for a new Marvell system-on-chip called Marvell CN9130. Despite the name, this chip is from a hardware point of view in the same family as the Marvell Armada 7K and 8K, which were already supported upstream.
  • Miquèl Raynal contributed a number of fixes and improvements to the Macronix SPI controller driver.
  • Miquèl Raynal added support for the ADC converters over SPI MAX1227, MAX1229 and MAX1231 to the existing max1027 IIO driver in the kernel. These ADCs have a 12-bit resolution.
  • Miquèl Raynal improved the SPI controller driver for the Zynq system-on-chips to correctly support multiple Chip Selects.

In addition to these direct contributions, some of the Bootlin engineers are also Linux kernel maintainers and therefore review and merge patches from other contributors: Alexandre Belloni as the RTC subsystem maintainer and Microchip platform co-maintainer reviewed and merged 45 patches from other contributors, Miquèl Raynal as the MTD subsystem co-maintainer reviewed and merged 39 patches from other contributors and Grégory Clement as the Marvell platform co-maintainer reviewed and merged 29 patches from other contributors.

Here is the detail of our contributions:

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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