A new set of patches hitting the Linux kernel mailing list today may cause some flashbacks and likely not on your 2025 bingo card... Some DeviceTree updates for AMD's short-lived Opteron A1100 "Seattle" ARM SoC that was cancelled shortly after being announced back in 2016.

Before AMD's successes with Zen, they had been considering some ARM-based designs for the data center. Back in 2016 they [1]announced the Opteron A1100 "Seattle" with eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores, dual channel DDR3 or DDR4 memory, dual 10GB Ethernet, PCI Express 3.0 x8, and other features for the time. While entering "mass production" in 2016, the [2]AMD Opteron A1100 Seattle was cancelled shortly thereafter without really penetrating the market and suffered from problems like broken PCI Express.

The AMD Seattle SoC support though has remained within the mainline Linux kernel even though there is no serious use left out of the scarce hardware. Coming as a surprise today though was seeing some new DeviceTree patches specifically for AMD Seattle. Arm software engineer and Linux kernel developer Rob Herring sent out a set of patches for the AMD Seattle DT updates. Though as opposed to any Seattle renaissance or the like, the patches appear to just be as a result of fixing schema warnings that came up during testing / routine maintenance:

"This short series fixes most of the schema warnings for AMD Seattle.

Arnd, Not sure if the AMD maintainers are active. If not, please take this directly."

Today's AMD Seattle [3]patch series amount to around 100 lines of DT fixes to clean things up with no real improvement for (any?) users. A bit surprising that the code wasn't just deleted. I had a double-take at first when seeing the AMD Seattle mentions while reading my LKML email and was at first wondering if AMD began re-using the Seattle codename...

[4]

Being reminded about AMD Seattle from these LKML patches, I did dig out this evening the old LeMaker Cello board I had received long ago from a third-party with the Opteron A1100 Seattle...

[5]

I never got it successfully booting and there were the known PCIe problems, but a 2025 reminder of the pre-Zen AMD days.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-A1100-Tomorrow

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Opteron+A1100

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250306-dt-amd-fixes-v1-0-011c423ba99a@kernel.org/T/

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=amd_seattle_lrg

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=amd_seattle2_lrg