Linux kernel embraces the new and abandons the old! Apple's M3 series chips finally receive support, while hundreds of outdated 32-bit ARM drivers are discarded.

August 20 news: Recently, all SoC-related updates for the Linux 7.3 kernel have been merged into the mainline. This update adds support for several new SoCs while officially deprecating multiple old 32-bit ARM platforms, leaving hundreds of drivers unmaintained.

New SoCs supported in Linux 7.3 include: Apple M3 Pro/Max/Ultra, Samsung Exynos 1580, Canaan K210, Sophgo SG2000, Qualcomm Shikra, and Altera Agilex72 with Cortex-A720 cores.

The addition of Apple M3 Pro/Max/Ultra completes coverage for the M3 product line, following the basic adaptation of the standard M3 in the previous version. However, current support only enables booting to a command-line console, with GPU drivers and many hardware features still not integrated, leaving it far from daily usability.

Sophgo SG2000 is an SoC targeting surveillance cameras and smart home devices, featuring a hybrid ARM and RISC-V architecture with two XuanTie C906 cores and one ARM Cortex-A53 core. RISC-V development boards based on this chip, the Milk-V Duo 256M and its variant Milk-V Duo S, have both received native mainline kernel support.

Qualcomm Shikra is an unreleased SoC with hardware architecture based on Cortex-A78C cores. Linux 7.3 has added device tree bindings for it, with GPU support also ready and set to launch with the mainline release.

Lenovo ThinkEdge SE70 has also gained mainline support. This device is based on the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX module, featuring six Carmel ARM cores and a Volta-architecture GPU, with 8GB or 16GB of LPDDR4x memory.

Other ARM devices newly supported in Linux 7.3 include Anbernic RG Vita-Pro, HINLINK H28K, YY3588, Sony Xperia M2, and NetCube Systems OpenNMC.

Developer Arnd Bergmann noted in the merge request that this update officially marks a batch of code as deprecated, which had long hindered kernel code cleanup and had extremely low real-world usage.

The deprecated items include 22 of the 28 legacy board-level configuration files predating the current device tree specification, as well as support code for Cortex-M3/M4/M7, ARM1136r0 CPU cores, and 25 devices based on these cores.