Linux 6.12 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.12 has been released during the past week-end, pretty much as expected after 7 release candidates. As usual, we recommend our readers to go through the amazing LWN.net articles covering the 6.12 merge window (part 1, part 2) to get a high-level overview of the major new features and improvements in this 6.12 release. One of the prominent improvement in this release, as far as the embeded industry is concerned, is obviously the merge of the final bits enabling PREEMPT_RT… which already caused our Real-Time Linux with PREEMPT_RT training course to be updated.

As usual, Bootlin again contributed to this release: with 118 commits merged, we are again in the top 20 contributing companies! Also, in addition to contributing our own code, several of our engineers are also maintainers, and as part of this work those engineers review and merge patches from other contributors. As part of this effort, for this 6.12 release:

  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC and I3C subsystems maintainer, merged 29 patches from other contributors
  • Miquèl Raynal, as the MTD subsystem co-maintainer, merged 24 patches from other contributors
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell platform maintainer, merged 4 patches from other contributors

Overall, 13 active Bootlin engineers made contributions to this release, which on a total staff of 24 people, means that more than half of our team has contributed to the Linux kernel for 6.12, a good indication of our strong focus on Linux kernel development and upstreaming!

Now looking at our contributions to 6.12, from a high-level:

  • Hervé Codina was our most prolific contributor, with 38 patches. Hervé has put the final touch to a massive effort aiming at supporting a very complex audio topology on fairly old Freescale/NXP platforms. This last bits of work have been focused on improving the drivers he had submitted to drivers/soc/fsl/qe to also support the MPC8312 processor, which has a slightly different QMC hardware block. We hope to publish soon a very detailed blog post on this work that spanned over several years and finally came to an end with these last patches!
  • Maxime Chevallier was the second most prolific contributor, with 25 patches merged. He mostly got his Ethernet PHY topology work merged, which he had presented on at Netdev last year and at Linux Plumbers this year. He also converted the fs_enet Ethernet MAC driver to the phylink API.
  • Miquèl Raynal was (as usual) active on the MTD subsystem, where he was mostly focused on improving the SPI NAND subsystem to support continuous read. Continuous read is an optimization that allows to improve the performance when reads from contiguous pages are made. The cover letter states: overall the speed gains are impressive: up to 45% when reading a block in 1-1-4 mode, where a substantial time is lost waiting for the chip to be ready.
  • Luca Ceresoli got his improvements to the dapm-graph and decode_stacktrace.sh tools merged.
  • Thomas Bonnefille, who worked as an engineering intern at Bootlin and recently joined as a full-time employee, saw his very first Linux kernel driver merged, an IIO driver for the ADC found in Sophgo RISC-V processors: drivers/iio/adc/sophgo-cv1800b-adc.c.
  • Thomas Richard improved power management support in the PCI code used on Texas Instruments platforms.
  • Théo Lebrun managed to get the pinctrl and reset drivers for the Mobileye EyeQ MIPS processors merged. He also worked with Thomas Richard on the Texas Instruments PCI power management effort.
  • Alexis Lothoré did quite a bit of work on eBPF tests, funded by the eBPF Foundation: he converted test_xdp_veth, test_dev_cgroup, get_current_cgroup_id_user, test_cgroup_stroage and test_skb_cgroup_id_user to the test_progs infrastructure.
  • Romain Gantois made a single contribution, but it adds a new feature to the TI TLV320AIC31xx audio codec driver. This feature allows to load filter coefficients from a firmware file, providing the ability to fine-tune the codec configuration.
  • Alexandre Belloni, Bastien Curutchet, Köry Maincent and Louis Chauvet also got a small number of patches merged, mostly fixes or small improvements. A patch from Clément Léger, who left Bootlin more than a year ago, also made its way upstream.

Here is the complete details of our 118 contributions to this kernel release:

Linux 6.11 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.11 has been released a week ago, the day before Open Source Summit Europe started, but as a large part of the Bootlin team was attending this conference and the immediately following Linux Plumbers conference, we are only posting now our usual blog post about our Linux 6.11 contributions.

As usual, we warmly recommend our readers to look at the articles from LWN.net covering the 6.11 merge window (part 1, part 2) to get a good high-level overview of the major new features and hardware support added in 6.11. CNX-Software also has a useful article on the 6.11 features relevant for embedded platforms.

From a Bootlin perspective, we contributed a total of 120 commits in this release, making us the 19th contributing company by number of commits, worldwide, according to the statistics. In addition to those 120 commits authored by Bootlin engineers, we reviewed and merged 76 patches from other contributors, as part of the Linux kernel maintainer role of several Bootlin engineers (Alexandre Belloni as the RTC and I3C maintainers, Miquèl Raynal as the MTD co-maintainer, and Grégory Clement as the Marvell platform maintainer).

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Linux 6.10 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.10 was released last Sunday, following its now well-known release cadence. As usual, head over to LWN.net to have some good summary of the important features merged in this kernel release: part 1 and part 2.

LWN also published an article on statistics of the 6.10 release cycle, and Bootlin shows up in the most active employers by changed lines, with 7746 lines changed by Bootlin engineers. According to ths Kernel Patch Statistics site, we contributed 110 changes, putting us as the 19th contributing company (counting “Unknown” and “Hobbyists” as companies).

Also, in addition to the 110 patches we contributed, some of our engineers are also maintainers of different subsystems, and as such they review/merge patches contributed by others:

  • Alexandre Belloni reviewed/merged 19 patches for the I3C and RTC subsystems which he maintains
  • Grégory Clement reviewed/merged 14 patches for the Marvell ARM and ARM64 platforms that he maintains
  • Miquèl Raynal reviewed/merged 12 patches for the MTD subsystem, which he co-maintains

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Power over Ethernet (PoE) support into the official Linux Kernel

Introduction

Power over Ethernet (PoE) is a technology that combines power and data transmission over a single Ethernet cable. It simplifies the installation of networked devices like cameras, phones, and wireless access points by eliminating the need for separate power cables. PoE standards define how power is delivered alongside data, ensuring compatibility across devices. Originally denoted as “Power via MDI” (Media Dependent Interface) in the 802.3 IEEE standard, it later evolved into the recognized term “PoE” in the 2022 version of the standard. PoE equipment consists of two key components: Power Sourcing Equipment (PSE) and Powered Devices (PD).

Linux support, DENT initiative

Up until recently, the upstream Linux kernel had absolutely no support for Power over Ethernet technologies. Due to that, every hardware vendor providing PoE hardware was delivering its own vendor-specific and non-standard solution, often centered around not so great user-space libraries, with dubious integration with the rest of the Linux ecosystem and networking stack, like is unfortunately still done quite often by hardware vendors.

The DENT project, which exists under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, aims at using the Linux Kernel, Switchdev, and other Linux based projects as the basis for building a new standardized network operating system without abstractions or overhead. Among other things supported by DENT is dentOS, a SwitchDev based NOS built on top of Open Network Linux, which includes PoE support, but based on yet another non-standard fully user-space driven solution in the name of poed, where even the HW-specific drivers are implemented in user-space.

So DENT set as a goal to implement a fully upstream solution in the Linux kernel to properly support Power over Ethernet, and contracted Bootlin to perform this development and upstreaming effort.

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Linux 6.9 released, Bootlin contributions inside!

Linux 6.9 was released last Sunday, and as usual we refer our readers to the excellent LWN.net coverage of the Linux 6.9 merge window (part 1 and part 2) to get a good overall picture of the improvements and new features brought by this release.

On our side, we contributed a total of 119 commits authored by Bootlin engineers, but we also merged a total of 95 patches from other contributors, as several Bootlin engineers as also maintainers of various drivers/subsystems in the Linux kernel.

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Linux 6.8 released, Bootlin contributions

The Linux 6.8 kernel has been released on March 10 by Linus Torvalds. As usual, we definitely recommend the coverage by LWN of the merge window for this release cycle to get a good grasp on the most important new features: first half and second half. Some work from Bootlin is briefly mentioned in those articles, such as the support for Lantiq PEF2256 (FALC56) framers, Lantiq PEF2256 (FALC56) pin controllers, and Techwell TW9900 video decoders.

With a total of 135 commits contributed by Bootlin engineers during this release cycle, we have been much more active than for the previous 6.7 release. This allows Bootlin to show in the recently published Development statistics for 6.8, as the 17th contributing company by number of commits, and 13th contributing company by number of changed lines.

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Linux 6.6 released, Bootlin contributions

Linux 6.6 was released yesterday, so this is the time for our usual blog post about our contributions to this release. Before that, to get an overall idea of what went into Linux 6.6, we recommend reading the articles from LWN.net covering the Linux 6.6 merge window: part 1 and part 2. The KernelNewbies page is perhaps a little bit less rich than it used to be, but still relevant.

On our side, this time around we contributed 68 changes to this release:

  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC subsystem maintainer, submitted a few asorted patches touching various drivers in this subsystem
  • Alexis Lothoré pushed some patches extending the rzn1-a5psw Ethernet switch driver with VLAN support and port_bridge_flags support. These patches were initially written by Clément Léger but had not been accepted until now.
  • Hervé Codina got his audio-iio-aux driver merged, which allows the ASoC subsystem (for audio devices) to use IIO devices, such as a potentiometer. This came together with a number of fixes/improvements in the IIO subsystem. Hervé also fixed some reference counting issues in several I2C mux drivers.
  • Miquèl Raynal pushed to the finish line a patch written several years ago by Bootlin engineer Kamel Bouhara, who hadn’t been accepted until now. This patch adds a sysfs interface that allows to retrieve the reset reason on Microchip ARM platforms
  • Luca Ceresoli fixed some issues in two DRM panel drivers and also fixed a regression in the NVidia Tegra camera interface driver
  • Miquèl Raynal did a number of different, unrelated, contributions:
    • support for the EDT ET028013DMA display panel to the existing sitronix-st7789v driver, which required quite a few preparation changes
    • fix a clock polarity issue in the DRM driver for the display controller used in Microchip ARM platforms
    • improve many small aspects of the qcom NAND controller driver
    • improve the handling of nvmem layouts in the nvmem subsystem
    • fix an issue in the SJA1000 CAN controller driver that would cause the HW to stall after an overrun on some platforms
  • Paul Kocialkowski contributed a few small asorted fixes in the media subsystem documentation

Here are the complete details of our contributions:

Bootlin collaborates with DENT to upstream ONIE NVMEM support in Linux

DENT project logoThe DENT project is a project from the Linux Foundation which aims at utilizing the Linux Kernel, Switchdev, and other Linux based projects as the basis for building a new standardized network operating system without abstractions or overhead.

Recently, Bootlin collaborated with the DENT project to work on a specific topic: extending the Linux kernel NVMEM subsystem to be able to support the ONIE TLV storage format which is used on ONIE-compliant network equipment to store in an EEPROM various information about the device: serial number, model, MAC addresses, and more.

This work, lead by Bootlin engineer Miquèl Raynal has now landed in Linux 6.4 as the drivers/nvmem/layouts/onie-tlv.c driver, together with the underlying new NVMEM layout infrastructure, which Miquèl helped to upstream in collaboration with Michael Walle.

We have written and published a longer blog post on the DENT website to explain the motivation for this effort and the results.

Linux 6.4 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.4 was released on June 25, just before the start of the Embedded Open Source Summit in Prague. As usual, lots of changes in Linux 6.4, and we recommend reading LWN coverage of the merge window (part 1, part 2). Sadly, the usual KernelNewbies page hasn’t received a lot of attention, contributions are probably welcome to revive this useful resource.

With 59 commits from Bootlin engineers, Bootlin is ranked as the #28 contributing company by number of commits for this 6.4 release, according to contribution statistics. Our main contributions have been:

  • Alexis Lothoré and Clément Léger contributed a few fixes to the Renesas RZ/N1 A5PSW Ethernet switch driver
  • Hervé Codina contributed a number of new drivers needed to support complex audio setups on some relatively old Freescale PowerPC 32-bit platforms: a driver for the Time Slot Assigner (TSA), a driver for the QUICC Multichannel Controller (QMC), and an ALSA driver that provides audio support over QMC. We have more contributions coming in this area, most notably to support HDLC network traffic over QMC.
  • Kamel Bouhara added support for the TI TAS5733 audio codec in the existing tas571x driver
  • Luca Ceresoli improved the fsl-ldb driver, used on NXP i.MX8MP and i.MX93 for the built-in DPI-to-LVDS encoder. Luca’s improvement allows to use LVDS channel 1 only, while the driver initially supported using either LVDS channel 0, or LVDS channel 0 and 1 combined.
  • Maxime Chevallier contributed an improvement to the regmap code, which allows upshifting register addresses before performing operations
  • Maxime Chevallier also contributed some small fixes to the phylink code related to previous work on QUSGMII support
  • Miquèl Raynal contributed the support for Real-While-Write in the MTD SPI-NOR subsystem. This allows to perform read operations while erase/program operations are on-going, which helps to reduce read latencies. This of course only works on SPI NOR chips that support this feature.
  • Miquèl Raynal contributed several improvements to the NVMEM subsystem. First, a brand new NVMEM driver capable of parsing the ONIE TLV information, as defined by the ONIE spec used on network equipment. Second, he contributed changes that allow NVMEM layout drivers to be compiled as kernel modules rather than being built-in

And the full details of our contributions:

Linux 6.2 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.2 was released a few days ago, and as usual we point our readers to the LWN coverage of the merge window (part 1 and part 2), or the traditional KernelNewbies page or alternatively the embedded focused CNX Software coverage.

At Bootlin, we contributed a total of 122 patches to this release, making Bootlin the 21st contributing company by number of commits according to statistics. Also Bootlin engineer Paul Kocialkowski appears in the top developers by changed lines in the Linux 6.2 statistics.

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