Adding to the plethora of new hardware support coming with the Linux 6.14 kernel is enabling upstream support for the FPGAs found on the Intel-powered AAEON UP single board computers that are targeted for makers, hobbyists, and various industrial uses.
There are various AAEON UP single board computers powered by Intel Celeron / Pentium / Atom SoCs and also featuring an Intel Altera MAX 10 FPGA. AAEON has been maintaining the FPGA support out-of-tree via DKMS modules on GitHub… Disappointing for such a major vendor. But thankfully there’s been work by upstream developers to get the support into the upstream Linux kernel.
Back in October 2023 was a patch series by separate developers working on enabling the CPLD/FPGA pin control support for the Linux kernel to get the functionality working. But those patches never made it to the mainline kernel. But then in December was this patch series by Bootlin developer Thomas Richard working on reviving the FPGA support for AAEON UP boards. Thomas explained in that newer patch series:
“I started a new series, as I re-wrote all the drivers using the AAEON DKMS driver as reference. I also read all series sent to the [mailing list] to collect the comments sent by the maintainers and reviewers (to not reproduce the same errors).
The FPGA acts as a level shifter between the Intel SoC and the HAT interfaces. The pinctrl driver shall manage FPGA pins in tandem with the corresponding Intel SoC pins. In the previous series, this was done using Intel pinctrl code (included in the FPGA pinctrl driver). Now this code was removed and gpiolib is used to drive the SoC pins.
The FPGA also drives some LEDs.
This series adds support for UP and UP Squared boards.”
Now via the MFD and LEDs pull requests for Linux 6.14, that FPGA support for the AAEON UP boards is finally hitting the mainline kernel.
Nice work by Bootlin and better than having to rely on out-of-tree DKMS driver support on GitHub…
