Linux on the Arm architecture and beyond
summary
Linux on Arm stops exponential C growth by replacing per‑board C with device tree and unified kernel images, reducing core code while creating over 600 device tree files (32‑bit) and over 550 (64‑bit). The soc tree handles roughly 900 patches per day from a 15,000‑patch ecosystem, adds one to three new SoC platforms per release, and still sees Cortex‑A7 dominate low‑end 32‑bit designs while Cortex‑A53 dominates 64‑bit; GPUs and SoC‑specific accelerators remain the hardest upstream work.
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chapters (23)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:45Maintainers and subsystems
- 2:20Arm kernel Maintainership split
- 3:05Patches merged by subsystem
- 4:00Kernel subsystem maintainer jobs
- 5:04Patches merged by Arm SoC maintainers
- 6:26Machine abstraction through Device Tree
- 6:50Multiplatform kernel
- 7:55New driver subsystems
- 8:27Code size and supported machines
- 9:34Upstream machines in Linux-5.16
- 12:0532-bit Armv7 SoCs by core type
- 16:37Platform/Kernel lifecycle
- 18:42Minimal platform support
- 19:23Full platform support
- 20:22Obstacles to upstreaming
- 22:21Changesets by architecture and version
- 23:40Changesets in minor architectures
- 24:04CPU architectures world map, ca. 2010
- 24:50Obsolete architecture removal
- 25:13User migration
- 25:44Endianness change
- 26:04New architectures
