Linux Begins Removing Support For Russia's Baikal CPUs
Beyond Linux 7.1 beginning to phase out Intel 486 CPU support, this next Linux kernel version is also beginning to remove driver code for supporting Russia's Baikal CPUs.
The Baikal CPUs were Russia's plans for replacing Intel / AMD CPUs with their own domestic processors. After Baikal first was planning for an Arm CPU, they went for MIPS and then years later pivoted back to ARM-based designs. Over the past decade various pieces of Baikal support made it into the mainline kernel but then further efforts were thwarted by Russia's war in Ukraine.
Back in 2024, various kernel maintainers were removed due to their association to Russia on grounds of compliance requirements. That included some of the Russian Linux developers working on the Baikal CPU support.
But due to sanctions they weren't able to get their chips manufactured by TSMC and ultimately Baikal Electronics entered bankruptcy. (There is talk of a new Baikal effort coming about with RISC-V CPU cores but with limited information and still not clear who would be manufacturing said chips due to sanctions, but is separate anyhow from the existing Baikal Linux support.)
With Linux 7.1 we are beginning to see that no longer maintained Baikal platform support being removed for lack of maintenance and the hardware that shipped being rather rare even inside Russia. Yesterday's ATA pull removed some Baikal bindings "since the upstreaming for this SoC is not going to be finalized."
There are also other removal patches pending for Baikal support with the basis:
For the support that does exist in the mainline kernel, you can keep using the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel.
The Baikal CPUs were Russia's plans for replacing Intel / AMD CPUs with their own domestic processors. After Baikal first was planning for an Arm CPU, they went for MIPS and then years later pivoted back to ARM-based designs. Over the past decade various pieces of Baikal support made it into the mainline kernel but then further efforts were thwarted by Russia's war in Ukraine.
Back in 2024, various kernel maintainers were removed due to their association to Russia on grounds of compliance requirements. That included some of the Russian Linux developers working on the Baikal CPU support.
But due to sanctions they weren't able to get their chips manufactured by TSMC and ultimately Baikal Electronics entered bankruptcy. (There is talk of a new Baikal effort coming about with RISC-V CPU cores but with limited information and still not clear who would be manufacturing said chips due to sanctions, but is separate anyhow from the existing Baikal Linux support.)
With Linux 7.1 we are beginning to see that no longer maintained Baikal platform support being removed for lack of maintenance and the hardware that shipped being rather rare even inside Russia. Yesterday's ATA pull removed some Baikal bindings "since the upstreaming for this SoC is not going to be finalized."
There are also other removal patches pending for Baikal support with the basis:
"Baikal SoC and platform support won't be finalised, remove stale pieces."
For the support that does exist in the mainline kernel, you can keep using the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel.