Linux 7.3 Deprecates Many Older 32-bit ARM Platforms, Orphans Hundreds Of Drivers

All of the SoC updates have been merged for the Linux 7.3 kernel that include adding some new SoCs as well as deprecating several older 32-bit ARM platforms. In turn with those platforms deprecated, "hundreds" of drivers are now orphaned in the process. New SoCs added to the mainline tree with Linux 7.3 include the Apple M3 Pro/Max/Ultra, Samsung Exynos 1580, Canaan K210, Sophgo SG2000, Qualcomm Shikra, and Altera Agilex72 using Cortex-A720 cores. Qualcomm Shikra is an interesting new one given the limited public information on that yet-to-be-released SoC based on the Cortex-A78C. And then there is also the M3 Pro / Max / Ultra enablement to complement the base Apple M3 SoC added in the prior kernel cycle. But for all these Apple M3 SoCs, the initial enablement is basically to be able to boot to a console and isn't yet ready for any usable day-to-day use due to lack of GPU driver support and many other features not yet being wired up for the Apple M3 Macs on Linux. Via the SoC driver pull is an Apple M1 improvement for saving around 1 Watt with the M1 Pro / Max / Ultra SoCs during s2idle for reaching lower power states. The Sophgo SG2000 is a Arm/RISC-V hybrid SoC intended for surveillance cameras, facial recognition systems, and other smart home devices. The SG2000 features a C906 at 1GHz and a second C906 core at 700MHz. Plus there is also an Arm Cortex-A53 core running at 1GHz. The Arm core was previously supported by the mainline Linux kernel while now the RISC-V support is in order too. The Milk-V Duo 256M now has mainline kernel support for that RISC-V board with the SG2002 SoC and 256MB of memory. The Milk-V Duo S is another variant also now supported. There is also now mainline kernel support for the Lenovo ThinkEdge SE70 that was based on the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX SOM with the 6-core Carmel ARM cores and Volta GPU while having 8GB or 16GB of LPDDR4x memory. Other new ARM machines supported by Linux 7.3 include the Anbernic RG Vita-Pro, HINLINK H28K, Youyeetoo YY3588, Sony Xperia M2, NetCube Systems OpenNMC, and others. As for all the ARM 32-bit platform deprecations, Arnd Bergmann noted in the pull request: "The 32-bit Arm platforms are a bit more interesting this time: I refreshed an earlier series to mark code as deprecated that does have the tendency of getting in the way of cleanups and new features but has close to zero users. Among these are: - 22 of the remaining 28 legacy board files that predate the current devicetree based descriptions, using old chips from Intel and Marvell. The remaining six board files are for TI OMAP1 and Samsung s3c64xx chips and all still have known users. - support for Cortex-M3/M4/M7 and ARM1136r0 CPU cores and the 25 machines based on these. These all use devicetree but the CPU support causes disproportional work. Most of them are just reference boards, the notable exceptions being the Nokia N800/N810 tablet and the Buglabs BUG platform. - be8, be32, oabi and iwmmxt userspace binaries, which were mostly associated with the platforms now scheduled for removal and are increasingly problematic to support with modern toolchains. Nothing is actually removed at this point, to ensure that any remaining users continue to have the 7.3-LTS for a while longer. Patches for removal are currently being tested." Once those platforms are removed in a future Linux 7.4+ kernel release, there are "hundreds" of drivers used by only those platforms that can be removed in turn as well. See the SoC pull requests for the full list of changes now merged for Linux 7.3.