The many SoC and platform/machine DeviceTree additions have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel! This includes finally having mainline support for the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board and its EIC7700 SoC, Apple M2 Pro / Max / Ultra DeviceTrees added and associated Apple Mac system support, various new Snapdragon X1 laptops now being supported by the mainline kernel and much more.
As usual there are a lot of SoC changes coming for this next version of the Linux kernel. Some of the key Linux 6.18 SoC highlights include:
– Support for the ESWIN EIC7700 SoC is added that features four SiFive P550 cores.
– In addition to the ESWIN EIC7700 SoC support, the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 DeviceTree is added for finally having mainline support for this SiFive development board. Too bad that it’s coming so late and at a time that Ubuntu 25.10+ is requiring RVA23 profile support.
– Apple M2 Pro, M2 Max, and M2 Ultra Device Trees are added. Linux has been working on them for a while and especially with downstream Asahi Linux but more of the DT support is finally working the way into the mainline kernel.
– Support for the Axis Artpec8 as an Armv8 chip based on Samsung Exynos designs.
– NXP i.MX91 support as a cut-down version of the NXP i.MX93 with just one Cortex-A55 core.
– Qualcomm Lemans Auto DeviceTree support.
– New Renesas SoC coverage with RZ/T2H (r9a09g077m44), RZ/N2H (r9a09g087m44), RZ/T2H (r9a09g077), and RZ/N2H (r9a09g087) industrial hardware.
– There are 65 new machines added of a number of industrial embedded systems, numerous new reference boards, and then laptops/systems based on Apple M2.
– New upstream support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 laptops of the Dell Thena, HP OmniBook X14, Dell Inspiron 14 Plus, Dell Latitude 7455, HP Omnibook X14, and Lenovo ThinkBook T16.
More details on these many changes for Linux 6.18 via these five pull requests already merged to Linux Git.
