Eindhoven, The Netherlands – AAEON’s UP brand, a leading provider of professional developer boards, is excited to announce that full Linux kernel support for its UP Squared series’ 40-pin I/O header has been officially merged into the Linux 6.18 release.
Following the brand’s 10-year anniversary last May, UP outlined its intention to complete the upstreaming of its DKMS drivers to the Linux mainline kernel. This objective was part of a broader set of initiatives aimed at providing users with a more streamlined route from concept to project deployment.
Upstream support is a goal that AAEON had been working towards for a number of years. However, coordinating the FPGA and Intel® SoCs on UP hardware has made mainline Linux support for the 40-pin header a challenge.
To resolve this issue and assist in pushing the project to completion, AAEON approached Bootlin, a leading embedded Linux and open-source development company. Bootlin’s embedded Linux development expertise was instrumental in resolving the pain points encountered during previous attempts to upstream support for its 40-pin header. By rewriting the pinctrl driver to remove Intel-specific code, adding a GPIO forwarder library, and extending the gpio-aggregator driver to create a reusable library, full upstream support was achieved. As a result, the UP Squared series’ 40-pin header now supports GPIO, I²C, UART, and SPI out-of-the-box on mainline Linux 6.18.
“This achievement is the result of a multi-year effort and close collaboration with Bootlin, and one that will provide a huge benefit to the entire UP community,” said Victor Lai, Managing Director of UP and AAEON Europe. “With upstream integration for our UP Squared series now established, we are already working hard to expand this support across our product family and help even more users transform their ideas into real-world successes.”
Detailed information regarding the project can be found via a blog post by Bootlin engineer Thomas Richard here. For more information about the UP Squared series, please visit the dedicated product page on the UP Board website, or contact your AAEON representative.
