Sven Peter today sent out all of the Apple SoC driver and DeviceTree (DT) updates aiming for the soon-to-happen Linux 6.17 merge window.
The Apple SoC DT/driver changes for the Linux 6.17 aren’t too particularly exciting with few changes to note for end-users. Arguably most interesting is the DeviceTree updates adding the bindings and nodes for the Apple GPU driver. However, the Apple GPU driver itself isn’t yet ready for upstreaming to the mainline kernel as it’s still held up in part on getting all of the Rust programming language infrastructure in place. So for now the Apple kernel graphics driver developed by Asahi Linux developers remains out-of-tree and just in the likes of the Asahi Linux distribution until all of the Rust code is ready to go into the mainline kernel.
Sven Peter wrote about the Linux 6.17 DT changes for Apple:
“Device tree updates which include the bindings and nodes for our GPU driver. The driver itself isn’t ready yet mainly due to rust dependencies but we’re confident about the bindings and want to commit to keeping them stable. Otherwise there are a two smaller changes: removing another W=1 warning (which required a change to the binding itelf that’ll also land in 6.17 through the NVMEM tree) and adding a missing touchbar framebuffer node to the Apple T2 SoC device tree.”
Nothing new to report on Apple M3/M4 support upstreaming either for the newer Apple SoCs and their ongoing enablement efforts within the Asahi Linux camp.
More details on the Apple code ready for Linux 6.17 via these pull requests.
