Linux 6.17 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Penguin coding, AI generatedLinux 6.17 was released a bit over a week ago, and as usual LWN.net gave the best summary of the new features and important changes in this release: part 1, part 2.

As usual, Bootlin contributed to this kernel, with a total of 98 patches authored by Bootlin engineers, but also another 94 patches that were reviewed/merged by Bootlin engineers, mostly by Alexandre Belloni (RTC and I3C maintainer, reviewed/merged 58 patches), Miquèl Raynal (MTD co-maintainer, reviewed/merged 20 patches) and Grégory Clement (Marvell EBU platform maintainer, reviewed/merged 8 patches).

Regarding our own contributions, the main highlights are:

  • As the RTC maintainer, Alexandre Belloni did a small cleanup in the PCF85063 RTC driver, improving the scoping of internal configuration structures.
  • Alexis Lothoré, working through the eBPF Foundation, improved eBPF support on ARM64, by removing stack constraints in the BPF JIT implementation and enabling additional tracing_struct selftests for this architecture.
  • Bastien Curutchet contributed a fix to the OMAP2 McSPI driver, ensuring the SPI clock signal is driven correctly during setup.
  • Benoît Monin made good progress on Mobileye EyeQ platform support in the MIPS architecture: he added eMMC controller support for both EyeQ5 and EyeQ6H SoCs, extended the Cadence SDHCI driver to support these platforms, updated the Device Tree bindings, and refreshed the default configurations accordingly.
  • Grégory Clement enhanced the MIPS architecture, refining the cluster CPU bring-up code, optimizing CPU calibration for SMP systems, and improving hardware feature detection by disabling unsupported MMID functionality.
  • Kory Maincent contributed extensively in two areas:
    • As part of this work with Texas Instruments, he added support for new BeagleBone Green Eco board, based on the TI AM335x processor, and its TPS65219 PMIC.
    • As part of his work with the Dent Project, he greatly extended the PSE framework used for Power over Ethernet support, adding support for power domains, event reporting, port priorities, budget evaluation strategies, and new features in pd692x0 and tps23881 drivers. This marks a major functional expansion of the Linux PSE subsystem.
  • Louis Chauvet improved the VKMS (Virtual Kernel Mode Setting) driver by documenting new pixel formats and adding support for the 16-bit ARGB and R* formats, while also exporting DRM symbols for testing.
  • Luca Ceresoli continued his large-scale refactoring effort in the DRM bridge subsystem. In 6.17, he converted all bridge drivers to use the new devm_drm_bridge_alloc() API, introduced KUnit tests, and added mechanisms to detect non-converted bridges. These changes are paving the road to the long-term goal of making DRM bridges hot-pluggable.
  • Miquèl Raynal focused on the SPI and SPI-NAND subsystems, improving timing accuracy in spi-mem, adding frequency awareness in operation handling, introducing a chip configuration hook, and enabling high-speed read modes for Winbond SPI-NAND devices. He also described SPI NAND support in the TI AM62A7 device tree.
  • Olivier Benjamin improved PinePhone Pro mainline support by updating and extending the camera descriptions (IMX258 and OV8858) in both the Rockchip device tree and Device Tree bindings, enabling better integration of its front and rear cameras.
  • Romain Gantois contributed two important regulator core fixes, improving voltage setting convergence and handling of stepped regulators, ensuring more robust regulator behavior across devices.
  • Thomas Richard contributed assorted platform and pinctrl updates, including the use of the new devm_pinctrl_register_mappings() helper in multiple drivers, and added watchdog support for NXP i.MX8QM platforms.
  • Théo Lebrun continued extending Mobileye EyeQ5 platform support, adding I²C and GPIO controllers and related devicetree nodes, along with corresponding updates in the EyeQ5 defconfig. Those build on top of past driver changes, making features available on the evaluation board by default.

And the complete details, commit by commit:

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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