Just shy of 1,000 new patches were merged on the SoC side for the Linux 7.2 kernel. Among all those patches are enabling five more SoCs to work with the mainline Linux kernel -- including the long-awaited Apple M3 support.

First and arguably most notable is the Apple M3 SoCs with their 2023 generation of Apple Mac hardware is now able to boot the Linux kernel. For Linux 7.2 there are five Apple MacBook laptop models based on the Apple M3 booting the mainline kernel. But before getting too excited, it's currently around alpha quality and with Linux 7.2 simply boots to a simple serial console. It will take longer before this reverse-engineered support is actually useful for end-users wanting to run Apple M3 products on Linux as their daily desktop/laptop.

This initial Apple M3 support in the mainline kernel comes after months of work by Asahi Linux developers on reverse-engineering. The downstream Asahi Linux code will be usable on M3 hardware sooner than the mainline Linux kernel but it will still be a while, especially for GPU acceleration and the like.

Linux 7.2 also enables the ASPEED AST2700 series as their first baseboard management controller (BMC) using the 64-bit Cortex-A35 core rather than 32-bit Cortex cores. Great BMC upgrade for next-gen servers.

The Qualcomm Dragonwing IPQ9650 wireless networking SoC with its Cortex-A78 and A55 cores now works with the mainline Linux kernel. The low-end ZTE zx297520v3 is another wireless networking SoC that can now boot the mainline kernel, but limited to 32-bit kernels for now. This bring-up of the zx297520v3 also revives the ZTE ZX SoC platform support that was dropped back in 2021 for being unmaintained at the time.

The Device Tree updates for Linux 7.2 also include enabling the Microsoft Surface Pro 12 inch laptop that uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1P42100 SoC.

The SpacemiT K3 RVA23 RISC-V SoC with the DT updates also adds initial support for the CoM260-IFX board. Also on the RISC-V side is WiFi support for the BeagleV Ahead and Lichee Pi 4A single board computers.

There is also some new smartphones supported by the mainline Linux 7.2 kernel including the Motorola Edge 30, support for the Google Pixel 3A XL with the Tianma panel,

For the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite "Glymur" SoC the Linux 7.2 kernel now enables the CPUFreq cooling devices in the Device Tree.

See the SoC pull requests for all the notable SoC/DT updates that are now in Git for Linux 7.2.