HoneyComb LX2160a and SystemReady- Empowering OSS Communities

SolidRun has always felt that empowering OSS communities through our hardware has been one of the keys to propelling the entire ecosystem forward. When we first launched HoneyComb (based on NXP LX2160a) as an attainable large core count Aarch64 SystemReady platform we understood it would take a lot of effort to achieve not just firmware compliance but also helping to get ACPI support for the onboard networking complex accepted into the mainline kernel as well as other missing bits. With these bits and pieces of driver support finally getting very close to mainline inclusion we are getting a boost of support from the community developers who are taking this work and packaging it up for different distributions making it easier for other developers to benefit from being able to easily install and use the full capabilities of their hardware with very little effort.

The most recent documentation and collaboration of this work are documented in a Fedora Magazine article written by John Boero. He covers the full experience of bringing up his hardware as well as provides a link to his Copr repository that includes a kernel package with all the patches that aren’t available in the default kernel yet. Liz Fong-Jones was one of the earlier devs who has done similar work for the latest Ubuntu stable image. You can find her documentation here. While these are the most mainstream distributions being supported by the community, we have also seen lots of work put into supporting OpenSuse, Alpine, Void, Debian, CentOS Stream, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD.

SolidRun is proud of the collaboration they have done with arm™ and NXP™ bringing an affordable SystemReady platform to the world’s developer community. Putting the hardware into developer’s hands has allowed them to fix bugs, learn about standards-compliant hardware, and ready the ecosystem for new hardware to work out of the box as it comes to market.