News: 0001486696

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Linux Patches Work To Upstream Raspberry Pi's RP1 PCI Device Support

([Raspberry Pi] 5 Hours Ago Raspberry Pi RP1)


Andrea della Porta of SUSE has been working on [1]upstreaming the Linux kernel support to boot the Raspberry Pi 5 on a mainline kernel. Over the past few months Andrea has posted [2]a number of different patches derived in part from Raspberry Pi's downstream kernel code. The latest effort being pursued by the SUSE engineer is on upstreaming Raspberry Pi RP1 PCI device support using a DeviceTree overlay.

With the Raspberry Pi 5 there is the RP1 as an in-house I/O controller / chipset used for providing the MIPI camera input, display output, USB 2, USB 3, analog video output, Gigabit Ethernet MAC, and other I/O functionality for this single board computer.

Andrea della Porta explained with [3]today's new patch series :

"RP1 is an MFD chipset that acts as a south-bridge PCIe endpoint sporting a pletora of subdevices (i.e. Ethernet, USB host controller, I2C, PWM, etc.) whose registers are all reachable starting from an offset from the BAR address. The main point here is that while the RP1 as an endpoint itself is discoverable via usual PCI enumeraiton, the devices it contains are not discoverable and must be declared e.g. via the devicetree.

This patchset is an attempt to provide a minimum infrastructure to allow the RP1 chipset to be discovered and perpherals it contains to be added from a devictree overlay loaded during RP1 PCI endpoint enumeration. Followup patches should add support for the several peripherals contained in RP1.

This work is based upon dowstream drivers code and the proposal from RH et al."

These patches also depend upon the still yet-to-be-upstreamed BCM2712 PCIe controller patches. We're quickly approaching one year since the release of the Raspberry Pi 5 in October and at this rate it's looking like by that point the mainline kernel will still not yet have full upstream support for this popular ARM64 SBC.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/SUSE-Upstream-Linux-RPi-5

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-5-RP1-Linux-RFC

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1724159867.git.andrea.porta@suse.com/T/#m4d89e2751e1395130cc9f89e953c37ed8cfbac7b


uid313

DanaG

The War Against Linux

A significant obstacle on the path to Linux World Domination has emerged. A
reactionary grass-roots movement has formed to fight, as they call it, "The
War Against Linux". This movement, code-named "LinSux", is composed of
people (mostly Microsoft stockholders and commercial software developers)
who want to maintain the status quo. They are fighting back against the
rise of Linux and free software which they see as a threat to their financial
independence.

The most damaging attack the LinSux folks have launched is "Three Mile
Island", a Windows macro virus designed to inflict damage on computers that
contain a partition devoted to a non-Microsoft OS. When the victim computer
is booted into Windows, the virus activates and deletes any non-Microsoft
partitions. Ironically, the many security flaws in Windows allow the virus
to damage alternative operating systems but leave Windows unscathed.

"The War Against Linux" has also been fought in more subtle ways.
Time-tested methods of Linux advocacy have been turned into subtle forms of
anti-Linux advocacy by the LinSux crowd. MSCEs are smuggling NT boxes into
companies that predominantly use Linux or Unix. LinSux "freedom fighters"
are rearranging books and software boxes on store shelves so that Microsoft
offerings are displayed more prominently.