Collabora announced a partnership with MediaTek to bring upstream support to the Genio IoT SoCs and boards in November 2024, but since the announcement was new at the time, no work had been done, and I didn’t write about it.
However, almost one year later, Collabora can now report very good progress, especially for MediaTek MT8395 boards like Genio 1200 EVK and Radxa NIO 12L, which are now usable with mainline/upstream Linux since most features are implemented. But improvements also extend to MediaTek Genio 510 and Genio 700 EVKs, and the collaboration will continue with work on newer MediaTek Genio and Kompanio processors for IoT solutions and Chromebooks.
The two MediaTek Genio 1200 boards can now boot mainline Linux without any out-of-tree patches while providing support for the Audio DSP, JPEG, video hardware encoders and decoders, the Arm Mali-G57 MC5 GPU (via the open source Panfrost driver), as well as DisplayPort and DSI display interfaces. The HDMI controller and UFS Storage (on the Radxa NIO-12L board) are also supported via patches that should soon be merged into mainline.
The Genio 510 and Genio 700 EVKs can also boot the latest mainline Linux kernel with support for eMMC/SD/SDIO, UFS, PCI-Express, USB, JPEG, and Video hardware encoders/decoders, DSI, DisplayPort, Embedded DisplayPort displays, Mali GPU, etc. You’ll find a mainline Linux support matrix for MediaTek Genio 350, 510, 700, and 1200 SoCs and boards, as well as their upstream integration kernel on Collabora’s Gitlab server.
While I’m sure they’ll keep on the aforementioned platform, Collabora engineers have also started work on the newer MediaTek Genio 520 and Genio 720 SoCs and EVK boards, and the MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910 SoC for “Chromebook Plus” laptops will also get upstreamed, this time through a partnership between MediaTek, Google, and Collabora.
The company shared a few details for the latter. As of mid-October 2025, all of the new clock controller hardware and partial power domain support had been successfully upstreamed, along with the Modem-specific power domains code. The next steps will be:
- A software implementation to communicate with the new Hardware Voter MCU in next-gen MediaTek SoCs
- Support for the new MIPI SPMI 2.0 controller found in Kompanio Ultra 910
- Support for Power Management ICs (PMICs) MT6316, MT6363, and MT6373 found on the Chromebook Plus platforms
- Initial support for Chromebook Plus laptops to boot on an upstream kernel
- Support the DisplayPort Controller
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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