Launched back in 2014 was the Marvell PXA1908 SoC intended for 4G LTE smartphones and featured four Arm Cortex-A53 cores. Not too impressive for its time and far less so today. Though after a decade of not seeing mainline Linux kernel support and some vendor kernels stuck in the Linux 3.14 era, the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle is expected to upstream support for this old smartphone SoC.
Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.17 kernel merge window is implementing initial support for the Marvell PXA1908 SoC and with that also enabling the Samsung Core Prime Velte as one of the few smartphones using the PXA1908. The four Cortex A53 cores with the Marvell ARMADA Mobile PXA1908 clock up to 1.5GHz and all-around far less powerful than the ARMADA PXA1936.
There was an attempt to upstream support for the Marvell PXA1908 back in 2017 but that didn’t pan out and then the vendor kernel sources that have been publicly available have long been outdated. In any event, if anyone happens to have a PXA1908 device the support is now queued into soc.git’s for-next branch ahead of the Linux 6.17 cycle.
