A bit more than a month after publishing the datasheet of the Armada 370 processor, Marvell has now released a similar datasheet for the more powerful Armada XP processor. The datasheet is available as a PDF document, with no registration, at http://www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-xp/assets/ARMADA-XP-Functional-SpecDatasheet.pdf, with a link to it clearly visible on the Armada XP product page.
As most of our readers probably know, Bootlin has been working and continues to work significantly on the Linux kernel support for Marvell processors. Thanks to this work done for more than two years now, the mainline Linux kernel has pretty good support for the Armada XP processor. This processor is a nice monster: up to 4 cores (PJ4B cores, which are roughly equivalent to Cortex-A9 but with LPAE support), up to 10 PCIe interfaces, multiple SATA interfaces, up to four Gigabit network interfaces, and many, many other things (XOR engine, cryptographic engine, etc.). Many of the processor features are already supported in mainline, and lately we’ve been focusing on power management features: cpuidle support for Armada XP will be part of 3.16, cpufreq support will either be part of 3.17 or 3.18, and suspend/resume should hopefully be part of 3.18.
The Armada XP processor is used in publicly available products:
- The very nice OpenBlocks AX3 platform from PlatHome (supported in mainline)
- The Netgear RN2120, a professional, rack-mounted, NAS (supported in mainline)
- The Lenovo ix4-300d NAS (in the process of being supported in mainline, see patch)
- The Linksys WRT1900AC wireless router (not yet supported in mainline)
- The Synology DS214 (not supported in mainline yet)
- The Synology DS414 (not supported in mainline yet)
At Bootlin, we are again really happy to see Marvell opening this datasheet, as it will allow all community developers to further improve support for this processor in the Linux kernel, but also in other open-source projects.