The mainline RISC-V Linux kernel port continues to become more featureful each kernel cycle... Last week for the start of the Linux 6.11 merge window there were [1]new RISC-V ISA extensions wired up while in ending out the v6.11 merge window this weekend there is yet more enablement activity.

A second round of RISC-V architecture updates were submitted and subsequently merged for the Linux 6.11 cycle. This RISC-V NUMA support depends upon the ACPI SRAT (System/Static Resource Affinity Table) and SLIT (System Locality Information Tables) tables being present for proper mapping of memory nodes to domains while the SLIT table provides distance metrics between proximity nodes. Notably it was Intel engineers adding this RISC-V NUMA ACPI support. Too bad though that proper ACPI support on RISC-V systems as of mid-2024 remains a rarity...

This secondary RISC-V pull also adds SPCR-based console output support, PPTT-based cache information reporting, 128GB mappings with the sv39 linear map, and other changes.

See [2]this pull request , which was already merged to the mainline Linux kernel codebase, for more details on these additional RISC-V updates in Linux 6.11.

The [3]Linux 6.11 merge window is set to end later today with the Linux 6.11-rc1 release.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.11-RISC-V

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/mhng-d1533559-79a3-401a-8eee-a743b80b3bb2@palmer-ri-x1c9/#t

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.11