Free Electrons contributes Linux support for Microsemi MIPS SoC

Earlier this month, Free Electrons engineer Alexandre Belloni posted a patch series (in its second version) adding initial support for Microsemi Ocelot SoCs, the VSC7513 and VSC7514. These SoCs are used for switches, so the biggest part of the chip is a switch fabric, built around a MIPS core and a few basic peripherals. While Free Electrons generally works on ARM platforms and has contributed support for numerous ARM processors in the Linux kernel, for this project we are contributing the support for a MIPS processor.

Alexandre’s initial patch series contains the basic support for the SoC:

• An irqchip driver for the chip interrupt controller
• A pinctrl and GPIO driver to configure pin-muxing and control GPIOs
• A reset driver to be able to reboot the platform
• A patch adding the core MIPS platform support, which is very simple because the platform is supported using Device Trees.
• A Device Tree describing the SoC and a Device Tree describing one evaluation board.

All in all, this patch series only adds support to boot the platform up to a shell, with interrupts, pin-muxing, GPIOs and UARTs enabled. Additional features will be contributed later, especially support for the switch fabric in the form of a switchdev driver.

We are happy to be working on Microsemi platforms, and to bring the support for yet another hardware platform to the official Linux kernel.