Along with the staging updates, driver core, and char/misc merges this week for the areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman, he also sent out the USB and Thunderbolt updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel.
The USB/Thunderbolt changes for Linux 6.15 aren’t too particularly exciting unless you are a customer of any of the newly-enabled hardware. Greg commented of the changes in the pull request:
“Here is the big set of USB and Thunderbolt driver updates for 6.15-rc1. Included in here are:
– Thunderbolt driver and core api updates for new hardware and features
– usb-storage const array cleanups
– typec driver updates
– dwc3 driver updates
– xhci driver updates and bugfixes
– small USB documentation updates
– usb cdns3 driver updates
– usb gadget driver updates
– other small driver updates and fixes”
When digging deeper into the USB/Thunderbolt patches, first up there is support for the Parade PS8830 USB Type-C Retimer. The Parade PS8830 is a re-timer for USB4, DisplayPort, and Thunderbolt 4 controlled via I2C. Typically this IC is used between a USB/DP PHY and the Type-C connector. Making this PS8830 addition more notable is that it’s used by several Snapdragon X Elite laptops. The driver in its initial form for Linux 6.15 supports DisplayPort 4-lanes, DisplayPort 2-lanes + USB3, and USB3 modes of operation. This new driver is named ps883x.
The USB DWC3 driver meanwhile has seen the DT bindings added for Rockchip RK3562 SoC support. There is also a DT addition for the USB DWC3 for the Samsung Exynos 7870 and Exynos 990.
The rest of the changes for the USB/Thunderbolt work in Linux 6.15 is relatively small and random. All of these changes have been merged to Linux 6.15 Git.
