Bootlin contributions to Linux 4.5

Adelie PenguinLinus Torvalds just released Linux 4.5, for which the major new features have been described by LWN.net in three articles: part 1, part 2 and part 3. On a total of 12080 commits, Bootlin contributed 121 patches, almost exactly 1% of the total. Due to its large number of contribution by patch number, Bootlin engineer Boris Brezillon appears in the statistics of top-contributors for the 4.5 kernel in the LWN.net statistics article.

This time around, our important contributions were:

  • Addition of a driver for the Microcrystal rv1805 RTC, by Alexandre Belloni.
  • A huge number of patches touching all NAND controller drivers and the MTD subsystem, from Boris Brezillon. They are the first step of a more general rework of how NAND controllers and NAND chips are handled in the Linux kernel. As Boris explains in the cover letter, his series aims at clarifying the relationship between the mtd and nand_chip structures and hiding NAND framework internals to NAND. […]. This allows removal of some of the boilerplate code done in all NAND controller drivers, but most importantly, it unifies a bit the way NAND chip structures are instantiated.
  • On the support for the Marvell ARM processors:
    • In the mvneta networking driver (used on Armada 370, XP, 38x and soon on Armada 3700): addition of naive RSS support with per-CPU queues, configure XPS support, numerous fixes for potential race conditions.
    • Fix in the Marvell CESA driver
    • Misc improvements to the mv_xor driver for the Marvell XOR engines.
    • After four years of development the 32-bits Marvell EBU platform support is now pretty mature and the majority of patches for this platform now are improvements of existing drivers or bug fixes rather than new hardware support. Of course, the support for the 64-bits Marvell EBU platform has just started, and will require a significant number of patches and contributions to be fully supported upstream, which is an on-going effort.
  • On the support for the Atmel ARM processors:
    • Addition of the support for the L+G VInCo platform.
    • Improvement to the macb network driver to reset the PHY using a GPIO.
    • Fix Ethernet PHY issues on Atmel SAMA5D4
  • On the support for Allwinner ARM processors:
    • Implement audio capture in the sun4i audio driver.
    • Add the support for a special pin controller available on Allwinner A80.

The complete list of our contributions:

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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