Samsung partnered with Tesla to release a set of 23 patches for making Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) SoCs available for the mainline Linux kernel. The 23 patches enable Tesla’s fully self-driving SoC to boot from the upstream Linux kernel, which is currently built using the downstream kernel.
Tesla not only supports the open-source AMD GPU Linux driver with Coreboot, it even supports adding it to the mainline Linux kernel. Tesla FSD SoC support includes device tree additions and various modifications to the kernel to provide this basic support, and the technology builds on the existing Samsung Exynos SoC driver path.
Tesla FSD SoC support only adds about 37,000 new lines of code by leveraging the existing Samsung driver code in the kernel. Tesla’s FSD SoC is a 14nm SoC launched in early 2019, and in addition to 12 Cortex-A72 cores, there is a Mali G71 GPU, two neural processing units, and other additional IP blocks.
Tesla FSD SoC support for the Linux kernel is currently under review at LKML for possible inclusion in a future mainline kernel release.