14 DAY TRIAL // Great news, guys, it was just announced that the upcoming Linux 3.7 kernel will incorporate support for multiple ARM System on Chips (SoCs) platforms.
Having all ARM platforms supported into a single kernel package is an amazing piece of news for everyone, from end users to Android and ARM-based hardware manufactures.
“This is a pretty significant branch. It's the introduction of the first multiplatform support on ARM,” said Olof Johansson in the Git commit page. “And with this (and the later branch) merged, it is now possible to build one kernel that contains support for highbank, vexpress, mvebu, socfpga, and picoxcell.”
Until today, all ARM platforms are separated in Linux kernel, kept into their own directory, under mach-<mach>/include/mach/* and each one had to list the device trees in order to compile for its boards in mach-<mach>/Makefile.boot.
“They now need to move out to a common location instead, and this branch moves a large number of those out to include/linux/platform_data. It's a one-time move and once it settles in, we should be good for quite a while,” stated Olof Johansson, the lead developer for Chrome OS kernel (x86/ARM).
When Linux kernel 3.7 is out, it will first support the following ARM platforms: VExpress, Highbank, SoC FPGA, Picoxcell and Mvebu. But support for more ARM platforms will be added to next releases of the Linux kernel.
As you all know already, Linux kernel 3.6 was just released a few days ago, bringing new features for the Btrfs filesystem, support for suspending to memory and disk at the same time, TCP small queues, TCP "Fast Open" mode, support for safe swapping over NBD/NFS, better support for EXT4 quota, support for the PCIe D3cold power state, VFIO, support for SMBv2 protocol, and much more.
Download Linux kernel 3.6 right now from Softpedia.