While the Raspberry Pi 5 is a great and popular Arm single board computer, some elements of getting the hardware support upstream have lagged behind just as was also the case with prior generations of the Raspberry Pi SBC. One of the enablement bits now inching its way toward the mainline kernel is Ethernet support on the Raspberry Pi 5.

Stanimir Varbanov of SUSE posted a set of five patches today for enabling the RP1 Ethernet support as found on the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer, plus the associated DeviceTree changes. The patches were worked on by Stanimir Varbanov and Raspberry Pi engineer Dave Stevenson.

The Raspberry Pi RP1 chip uses IP based on the Cadence GEM Ethernet controller, which is already supported by the mainline Linux kernel and thus mostly making adjustments and then DT changes for bringing up the Raspberry Pi 5 Ethernet support.

Those interested can see this patch series for the work on enabling Raspberry Pi 5 Ethernet with the mainline Linux kernel. Given the small changes needed, we'll see if this manages to go mainline for the v6.18 LTS cycle later in the year.