Arm News Archives

The ongoing rise in AI/LLM-generated patches hitting the mailing lists and affecting development workflows continues to impact Linux kernel development. For the ARM64 architecture updates in Linux 7.2 is an interesting anecdote over over feeling like this activity has "slowed us down a little on the feature side" and having to deal with this AI/LLM patch activity resulted in some features now being postponed from making it for this current Linux kernel development cycle.

Made public today is CVE-2025-10263 as a "critical" security vulnerability affecting many different Arm CPU cores. CVE-2025-10263 could allow for privilege escalation on affected systems due to a specific timing condition during a memory permission change. Fundamentally it comes down to completion of affected memory accesses might not be guaranteed by the completion of a TLBI.

For those interested in the prospects of running Snapdragon X2 laptops on Linux rather than Windows 11 on ARM, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 has emerged as one of the initial X2 laptops with tentative Device Tree handling to allow Linux to boot on this latest-generation Qualcomm-powered laptop,

Arm today announced the open-sourcing of Metis, an agentic AI security framework that delivers context AI-powered security analysis in looking out for software vulnerabilities.

A new core infrastructure improvement for the Linux kernel on ARM being worked on is enabling 128-bit page table entries (PTEs) with FEAT_D128 as a new optional feature of Armv9.3 and later.

The Linux 7.1 mainline kernel will allow building a real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel for the ARM architecture with no longer needing any out-of-tree patches.

Merged recently to the latest LLVM/Clang compiler development tree is the Arm C1-Ultra scheduling model for helping with delivering optimal binaries for that flagship next-gen Arm mobile CPU.

Merged yesterday to the Linux 7.1 kernel is a workaround for an Arm C1-Pro CPU hardware bug around its Scalable Matrix Extension implementation.

The GCC open-source compiler has landed initial targeting support for Arm's newly-announced AGI CPU.

Merged yesterday were all the CRC code updates for the Linux 7.1 kernel. Most notable with that pull is an ARM64-optimized CRC64-NVMe implementation that can deliver multiple times faster performance.

IBM announced today a strategic collaboration with Arm around new dual-architecture hardware.

Arm announced their first silicon product in history with today's AGI CPU. The Arm AGI CPU complements their existing IP offerings into a production-ready silicon product for AI data centers.

A new platform feature being worked on by Arm engineers for the Linux kernel is Live Firmware Activation to allow for updated firmware components to be deployed without requiring a system reboot.

Beyond all of the exciting Intel/AMD x86_64 changes and improvements to enjoy with the upcoming Linux 7.0, there is one notable ARM64 feature addition this kernel cycle.

Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are hoping to provide mainline support for the Acer Swift SFA14-11 laptop powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite X1E78100 SoC.

Adding to the early headaches of Linux 6.19 with some regressions in performance and functionality were ARM64 hosts crashing on this in-development kernel version for those platforms using EFI. But a fix is now merged ahead of Linux 6.19-rc3 due out tomorrow.

The ARM64 code changes were merged last week into the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. The most notable of the ARM64 architecture changes this cycle is landing the Arm MPAM driver for Arm's Memory System Resource Partitioning and Monitoring.

Initially upstreamed into the Linux 6.18 kernel is Tyr as a Rust-based GPU kernel driver for Arm Mali hardware. This is in effect a Rust alternative to the Panthor DRM kernel driver for newer Arm Mali GPUs with the Command Stream Firmware (CSF). With the latest development code for Tyr, it's moved onto running the GNOME desktop and basic games like SuperTuxKart.

Sent out today and already merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel is the latest batch of 64-bit ARM "ARM64" architecture fixes. Most notable is a fix for addressing a "catastrophic performance issue" that was uncovered.

The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is now expected to introduce the new "ethosu" accelerator driver for supporting the Arm Ethos U65/U85 neural processing unit IP.

Since Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite last month, Linux patches for the X2 Elite "Glymur" platform have begun flowing. Among the recent Linux patches for the Snapdragon X2 is this past week seeing initial display support.

Last month Arm announced the Lumex CSS platform with C1 CPUs and Mali G1 GPUs. One month later, Arm is already beginning to open-source graphics driver patches for enabling the new Mali-G1 graphics processor.

In addition to the Arm and RISC-V SoC changes and new platforms/machines added for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the separate Device Tree pull request was merged for this next kernel version that also now adds the strings for the upcoming Arm C1 Nano, Pro, Premium, and Ultra processor cores.

All of the ARM64 feature changes intended for the Linux 6.18 merge window have been submitted in advance. There are a few new features worth calling out for 64-bit ARM Linux users.

Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs as building off their X Elite laptop SoCs that shipped last year. With the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (X2E-96-100) flagship is 18 cores with a 5.0GHz single and dual core boost frequency.

Linux kernel developers are evaluating the idea of removing HIGHPTE support from the Linux kernel due to its maintenance burden and just one ARM system currently using it.

Arm this evening lifted the lid on Lumex, their new compute subsystem platform that is purpose-built around AI for next-gen PCs and smartphones.

It's wild to think that the ARM Cortex-A72 was already announced ten years ago as the ARM core design that went on to appear in the Raspberry Pi 4, AWS Graviton server processor, and various other SoCs. ARM Cortex-A72 based hardware remains in widespread use and finally by the end of 2025 there will be a mainline Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" driver in the mainline Linux kernel for this core.

The open-source Panthor Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver providing the modern kernel graphics driver support for recent Arm Mali GPUs will be supporting a number of additional GPU models with the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year.

Andrew Morton this week sent in some additional memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.17 to complement last week's many MM patches from new optimizations to more DAMON features. Most notable with this secondary set of patches are khugepaged optimizations that especially help ARM64 Linux systems.

The ARM64 (AArch64) architecture updates have been submitted ahead of the imminent Linux 6.17 merge window.

The newest open-source Linux kernel driver being worked on for the growing accelerator "accel" subsystem is a new hardware driver courtesy of Arm for enabling their Ethos U65 and U85 NPUs.

Arm engineer Karunika Choo has been leading the effort to enable support for the latest Mali GPUs within the open-source and upstream "Panthor" DRM kernel graphics driver for Linux. This work includes being able to enable the latest Mali 5th Gen GPUs on this open-source graphics driver.

The Linux kernel had not enabled support for Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) due to bugs, but with the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel those issues have been resolved and so SME can now be enabled for the rare SoCs having said hardware support.

Introduced last year for Linux 6.13 was lazy preemption "PREEMPT_LAZY" for a preemption model that is similar to full preemption but less eager to preempt normal scheduler tasks to provide some of the performance benefits found with voluntary preemption. After initially being supported for x86_64 and RISC-V, it looks like Linux 6.16 will support lazy preemption on ARM64 (AArch64).

All of the ARM64 changes were merged this week to the Linux 6.15 kernel for enhancing the 64-bit ARM processor support.

Arm engineer Karunika Choo today sent out the latest patches developing a new GPU-specific initialization framework for the Panthor open-source kernel graphics driver as part of bringing up support for newer Mali GPUs.

SoftBank Group just announced they will be acquiring Ampere Computing, the leader in ARM64 server processors that has come under increasing pressure with more of the public cloud service providers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon/AWS turning to their own in-house ARM64 server processor designs.

If you happen to have a rare ARM64 platform with Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) support, with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel there is set to finally be run-time SMT controls similar to the functionality long available on x86/x86_64 processors.

For some newer Arm core designs, Arm is changing the Linux kernel to defaulting to enabling Kernel Page Table Isolation "KPTI" if not running on a new firmware version in order to properly mitigate a recently disclosed CPU security issue. This change has been queued up and is expected to change the default with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel.

Arm software engineer Peter Waller has shared some insightful benchmarks of the impact of PGO, Context Sensitive PGO (CSPGO), and BOLT optimizations across various classes of Neoverse processor designs.

The GCC "-fschedule-insns" option allows for reordering of instructions to eliminate execution stalls when required data is unavailable. This early scheduling option can be beneficial for systems with slow floating point performance or costly memory load instructions. With the upcoming GCC 15 release, AArch64 will be enabling this early scheduling optimization at the -O3 optimization level and higher.

A pull request was sent out on Friday that could potentially land for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel to transition ARM's kernel entry code from some architecture-specific Assembly over to using the generic entry code path. It means more unification and transitioning some Assembly code over to C, but it also comes with some hits to performance.

ARM64 ILP32 is the Armv8 architecture with a 32-bit ABI rather than 64-bit -- akin to the "x32" x86 effort that never really took off on Linux. ARM64 ILP32 support never ended up making it into the mainline Linux kernel or GNU C Library but did appear within the GNU Compiler Collection. But years later and little use, GCC developers are consider deprecating ILP32 support ahead of its eventual removal.

Arm today sent out their third iteration of their Linux kernel patches for adding Arm Morello platform support to the kernel: an experimental extension of Armv8.2-A paired with the CHERI v7 ISA.

The Samsung ARM device updates are in the process of being queued up to the SoC tree ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window in January.

A new set of patches implement EC, UCSI, and PSY drivers for the ARM-based HUAWEI MateBook E Go laptops powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs. In turn these new Linux kernel patches get a lot more functionality working for these Huawei ARM64 laptops.

For those interested in making use of Linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops that have been appearing since earlier this year, there's a new embedded controller (EC) driver posted for the Linux kernel for this EC that's found on most of the X1 laptop models.

Some Qualcomm processors/SoCs on the mainline Linux kernel are left vulnerable to Spectre security issues since Qualcomm hasn't upstreamed patches for properly treating affected CPU cores to their relevant mitigations. But a new patch series from a Google engineer is working to get those Qualcomm CPU security mitigations in order.

The ARM64 (AArch64) architecture changes have been submitted for the now-open Linux 6.13 merge window.