With the Serial Peripheral Interface “SPI” subsystem updates for the Linux 7.0 kernel comes support for multi-lane SPI.
Multi-lane SPI support is for SPI controllers and peripherals having multiple data lanes with those data lanes being independent sets of SDI/SDO lines and each with their own serialize/deserializer attached.
The documentation patch for this multi-lane work led by BayLibre’s David Lechner explains the ins and outs of multi-lane SPI.
“The highlight here is that David Lechner has added support for multi-lane SPI devices. Unlike the existing dual/quad SPI support this is for devices (typically ADCs/DACs) which support multiple independent data streams over multiple data lanes, instead of sending one data stream N times as fast they simultaneously transfer N different data streams. This is very similar to the case where multiple devices are grouped together but in this case it’s a single device in a way that’s visible to software.
Otherwise there’s been quite a bit of work on existing drivers, both cleanup and feature improvement, and a reasonable collection of new drivers.”
More details on these SPI changes for Linux 7.0 via this pull that has already been merged to Git.
