Linux 6.19 For RISC-V Brings Parallel CPU Hotplugging, Zalasr Ratified ISA Support
The RISC-V CPU architecture changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel.
With this new kernel RISC-V now supports CPU hot-plugging in parallel for secondary CPU cores. Secondary CPU cores can now be brought up asynchronously with the "HOTPLUG_PARALLEL" kernel feature now being supported on RISC-V for more quickly bringing up multiple CPU cores besides the primary CPU0. The CPU hot-plugging support particularly with RISC-V SoCs is primarily about dynamic enabling/disabling of CPU cores while the system is running rather than needing to handle their bring-up sequentially.
Another big feature of RISC-V with Linux 6.19 is supporting the Zalasr RISC-V ratified ISA extension. Zalasr covers RISC-V's Atomic, Load-Acquire Store-Release instructions. The code was under review and the mainline kernel now supports RISC-V's ratified ISA specification for this extension.
The Zicbop extension is also now exposed to user-space with the hardware and kernel support ready. Zicbop is for the Cache Block Prefetch Operations.
The RISC-V code in the new kernel also optimizes the vector regset allocation for ptrace(), enables the user-space RAID6 test to build and run with RISC-V vectors, and various other updates. See this pull for all the RISC-V highlights of Linux 6.19.
With this new kernel RISC-V now supports CPU hot-plugging in parallel for secondary CPU cores. Secondary CPU cores can now be brought up asynchronously with the "HOTPLUG_PARALLEL" kernel feature now being supported on RISC-V for more quickly bringing up multiple CPU cores besides the primary CPU0. The CPU hot-plugging support particularly with RISC-V SoCs is primarily about dynamic enabling/disabling of CPU cores while the system is running rather than needing to handle their bring-up sequentially.
Another big feature of RISC-V with Linux 6.19 is supporting the Zalasr RISC-V ratified ISA extension. Zalasr covers RISC-V's Atomic, Load-Acquire Store-Release instructions. The code was under review and the mainline kernel now supports RISC-V's ratified ISA specification for this extension.
The Zicbop extension is also now exposed to user-space with the hardware and kernel support ready. Zicbop is for the Cache Block Prefetch Operations.
The RISC-V code in the new kernel also optimizes the vector regset allocation for ptrace(), enables the user-space RAID6 test to build and run with RISC-V vectors, and various other updates. See this pull for all the RISC-V highlights of Linux 6.19.