Linux Kernel v5.4 released, our contributions

Linux v5.4, the latest version of the kernel, was released on Monday November 25th. An excellent summary of this release can be found over on KernelNewbies. As always, LWN.net has in-depth coverage of the statistics from the 5.4 development cycle, where BayLibre is once again in the top 20 list of most active employers.

This time Neil Armstrong made it onto the list of most active developers by number of lines changed, coming in at 12th place with a whopping 7370 changed lines. Also, Kevin Hilman was recognized as one of the most prolific testers in the 5.4 cycle and ranked in 5th position for developers providing the most Tested-by tags.

Here’s a summary of our contributions, organized by SoC family, and a summary graph of contributions by developer.

Amlogic SoCs

This was another Amlogic-heavy development cycle for us, and we collectively contributed 119 patches to improve or extend the kernel’s Amlogic support. Those changes were added by Neil Armstrong, Maxime Jourdan, Jerome Brunet, Alexandre Mergnat, Julien Masson, and Kevin Hilman, and they included:

  • Adding support for the SM1-based Khadas VIM3L board
  • Adding support for the SM1-based SEI610 board
  • Enabling DVFS for the SEI610, Odroid-N2, U200, SEI520, and X96-MAX boards
  • Also adding support for USB and HDMI display for the SEI610 board
  • Replacing the VPU-centric power domain controller with the generic Everything-Else power domain controller for G12-based boards
  • Miscellaneous fixes for the GXBB, G12A, and GXL boards
  • Converting various device tree bindings to YAML to take advantage of DT validation

MediaTek

Fabien Parent continued his work on MediaTek’s SoCs and added MT8516 SoC support to the PWM and CPUFreq subsystems in the Linux kernel 5.4 release.

Texas Instruments

This release, Bartosz Golaszewski contributed a variety of patches for the TI DaVinci family of SoCs.

  • Convert DA850 EVM boards to use the GPIO backlight driver
  • Support multiplatform build for ARM
  • Switch all DaVinci boards that use device tree or the old board files to the new clocksource driver
  • A range of cleanups and patches to simply the fbdev code

DRM

Jerome Brunet and Julien Masson contributed changes to the DRM subsystem.

  • Add support for more i2s formats to the Synopsys DesignWare I2S audio driver
  • Various fixes and improvements for the Synopsys DesignWare DRM driver

And Neil Armstrong was added to the MAINTAINERS file as co-maintainer of DRM bridge drivers.

Audio

Once again, Jerome Brunet provided fixes and cleanups for the ASoC subsystem.