Linux 6.18 LTS release - Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.18 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), which will likely become the next LTS kernel [update: it’s now official]:

So I’ll have to admit that I’d have been happier with slightly less bugfixing noise in this last week of the release, but while there’s a few more fixes than I would hope for, there was nothing that made me feel like this needs more time to cook. So 6.18 is tagged and pushed out.

Most of the last-minute fixes are minor fixes to drivers, with some random noise elsewhere (bluetooth, ceph, afs..). Nothing strikes me as standing out, but hey, there’s a shortlog appended if you want to see the details.

And this obviously means that the merge window will open tomorrow, and I already have three dozen pull requests pending. Thanks. And as I already mentioned a couple of weeks ago in one of the rc release notes, this upcoming release will have the merge window coincide with the yearly kernel maintainer summit, which means that I’ll be traveling the second week. I hope to have all the bulk of the merge window done before travels and that it won’t be all that noticeable, but we’ll see.

So the actual rc1 release might be delayed by travel, but that will *not* mean that I would accept late merge window pull requests. It just means that I might not deal with on-time requests quite as timely manner as is the norm, and maybe rc1 will be delayed by timezones and a day or two. Just a heads-up (but I’ve done the “travel during the second week of the merge window” thing before, and usually the impact is fairly low).

And then later in the 6.19 release, we have the holiday season. That typically delays the release by a week.

Now, when looking at the calendar, I’m not 100% sure an extra week would be needed for 6.19, because even a regular release schedule would make it be in February. And people will presumably have gotten over their food coma by then. But right now my plan is to just make 6.19 go to rc8 just because I don’t see much downside to adding that extra week to make up for any possibly lost time.

Anyway, *today* the important kernel is the newly minted 6.18 release. Please do keep testing,

Linux 6.17 was released on September 28, about two months ago, removing support for single-core processors (those now run with SMP support), implementing attack-vector controls for the x86 architecture to give better control over which mitigations for hardware vulnerabilities, adding support for live patching on 64-bit Arm systems, and merging the newDAMON_STAT kernel module for simplified monitoring of memory-management activity in the system, among many other changes. Now that Linux 6.18 is out, it’s time to check out some interesting changes and delve into more details about the Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures.

Newsworthy changes in Linux 6.18

Some notable changes in Linux 6.18 include:

The controversial bcachefs filesystem has been removed in its entirety and is now managed as an external DKMS module.
UDP receive performance has been improved by up to 47%.
Using the swap table infrastructure as a swap cache backend leads to 5 to 20% performance in throughput, RPS, or build time for benchmark and workload tests. See commit for details and some benchmarks.
Rust support expands with bindings for Linux-kernel-memory-model-compliant atomic operations, using maple trees, creating DebugFS files, and manipulating bitmaps. Arm Mali CSF-based Tyr GPU driver written in Rust. Greg Kroah-Hartman also said that all of the pieces needed to implement a typical USB driver in Rust are now in place.

Arm changes in Linux 6.18

Allwinner
- Allwinner A523 – Add support for GMAC200, MCU PRM clock, reset controller, and Vivante GC9000 NPU
- Drivers – Some changes to the SRAM driver. One to register a syscon explicitly. Another to add a new driver entry for the A523, which has two Ethernet controllers, and thus has two RGMII clock delay control registers.
- Device tree changes for Linux 6.18
  - Support for the MCU PRCM clock and reset controller on the A523/A527/T527 family of SoCs, notably impacting the NPU (Vivante GC9000 IP block)
  - The A523 family development boards now have their internal RTC clocks configured correctly, so that the RTC does not drift wildly. The missing functions for the AXP717 on these boards are added. Missing reset GPIOs and delays for Ethernet PHYs are added. Last, the Cubie A5E now has its LEDs described and usable.
  - An overlay for the Orange Pi Zero interface (addon) board was added. This can be used with the Orange Pi Zero and Zero Plus 2. Default audio routing for these two boards (to be used with the addon) was added to complement the overlay.
- New devices
  - Amediatech X96Q TV box (Allwinner H313)
  - NetCube Systems Nagami SoM (Allwinner T113s) and two carrier boards.
Rockchip
- PHY
  - Rockchip RK3588 MIPI CSI-2 DPHY support, RK3528 combphy support
  - Enable U3 OTG port
  - PCIe – Switch to FIELD_PREP_WM16 macro
- Clock – Export the dsi-24MHz clock on the RK3368, which seems to get some attention to enable DSI support there.
- DRM – RK3588 DPTX output support
- Rocket – Add a new driver for Rockchip’s NPU found in the RK3588 SoC
- New devices
  - FriendlyElec NanoPi Zero2 SBC (Rockchip RK3528A)
  - ArmSoM Sige1 SBC (Rockchip RK3528A)
  - Radxa ROCK 2A/2F boards (Rockchip RK3528A)
  - HINLINK H66K/H68K router boards (Rockchip RK3568)
  - Firefly ROC-RK3588-RT
Amlogic
- ASoC – iu-encoder-i2s: fix bit clock polarity
- SPI
  - Support for Amlogic A113L2
  - Add Amlogic A113L2 SFC flash controller
- Clock
  - Factorize Amlogic clock controller probe functions
  - Clean up Amlogic peripheral clocks definitions
  - Clean redundant Amlogic composite clock definitions
- Pinctrl – Add missing i2c_d pinmux; Amlogic GXL has 4 I2C attached to gpio-periphs. I2C_D is on GPIOX_10/11. Add the relevant func 3 pinmux per the datasheet for S805X/S905X/S905D.
- Driver changes
  - Device leak at probe in meson_sm
  - Fix compile-test default for meson_sm
- ARM64 device tree for Linux 6.18:
  - Add cache information to the Amlogic SoCs
  - Add RTC node for Amlogic C3 SoC
  - Fix PWM node for Amlogic C3 SoC
  - Remove UHS capability for Odroid-C2 SD card
- New device – N/A
Samsung
- Memory controller drivers – Samsung Exynos SROM: Fix IO map resource leak if of_platform_populate() in probe() failed.
- clk driver
  - Tesla FSD: Expose CSI clocks to consumers (DTS)
  - Exynos990
    - Few fixes for fixed factor clocks, register widths and proper PLL parents
    - Add four more clocks for the DPU and HSI0 clock for USB
    - Add PERIC0 and PERIC1 clock controllers (CMU), responsible for providing clocks to serial engines
  - Add seven clock controllers for the new Axis ARTPEC-8 SoC. The SoC shares all main blocks, including the clock controllers, with Samsung SoC, so same drivers and bindings are used.
  - Cleanups: switch to clk_ops::determine_rate()
- pinctrl drivers
  - Add pin controller drivers for new Axis ARTPEC-8 SoC. The SoC shares all main blocks, including the pin controller, with Samsung SoC, so same drivers and bindings are used.
  - Drop remaining support for Samsung S3C2410 SoC pin controllers. The actual SoC support was removed in January 2023, so this is just remaining cleanup.
- SoC Drivers
  - Google GS101
    - Enable CPU Idle, which needs programming C2 idle hints via ACPM firmware (Alive Clock and Power Manager). The patch introducing this depends on ‘local-timer-stop’ Devicetree property, which was merged in v6.17.
    - Fix handling error codes in ACPM firmware driver when talking to PMIC.
  - Exynos2200 – Add dedicated compatible for serial engines (USI).
- DTS ARM changes
  - Drop S3C2416 SoC from bindings, because it was removed from kernel in 2023.
  - Add Ethernet attached via SROM controller (memory bus) on SMDK5250. This wasn’t tested, but code should work just like it is working on Exynos5410-based boards.
- Samsung DTS ARM64 changes for Linux 6.18
  - Exynos850 e850 board – Enable Ethernet.
  - Exynos990 – Enable watchdog and USB, add more clock controllers.
  - Exynos2200 – Switch to 32-bit address space for blocks, because all peripherals fit there. Add remaining serial engine (USI) nodes serial, I2C).
  - Several cleanups.
- Defconfig changes
  - Cleanup MTD_NAND_S3C2410, being removed from the kernel via separate tree.
  - Enable Axis ARTPEC SoC in arm64 defconfig – new Samsung subarch.
- New Device – Axis Artpec ARTPEC-8 SoC with board, basic support (not from Samsung directly, but the design is from the Korean company and shares “all basic blocks with other Samsung SoCs (busses, clock controllers, pin controllers, PCIe, USB)”. The media/video blocks are from Axis)
Qualcomm
- Clock driver
  - Introduce Qualcomm Glymur global, display, rpmh, and tcsr clock controllers
  - Introduce Qualcomm IPQ5424 APSS clock controller
  - Extend the Qualcomm MSM8916 global clock controller to add support for MSM8937
  - Convert Qualcomm alpha PLL to determine_rate() clk_ops
  - Add missing resets in Qualcomm SC7280 display clock controller
- Mailbox – Add Glymur CPUCP mailbox binding
- PCIe controller driver
  - Select PCI Power Control Slot driver so slot voltage rails can be turned on/off if described in Root Port devicetree node
  - Parse only PCI bridge child nodes in devicetree, skipping unrelated nodes such as OPP (Operating Performance Points), which caused probe failures
  - Add 8.0 GT/s and 32.0 GT/s equalization settings
  - Consolidate Root Port ‘phy’ and ‘reset’ properties in struct qcom_pcie_port, regardless of whether we got them from the Root Port node or the host bridge node
  - Fetch and map the ELBI register space in the DWC core rather than in each driver individually
  - Enable ECAM mechanism in DWC core by setting up iATU with ‘CFG Shift Feature’ and use this in the qcom driver
  - Add SM8750 compatible to qcom,pcie-sm8550.yaml
  - Update qcom,pcie-x1e80100.yaml to allow fifth PCIe host on Qualcomm Glymur, which is compatible with X1E80100 but doesn’t have the cnoc_sf_axi clock
- PHY
  - New: Qualcomm SM8750 QMP PCIe PHY dual lane support, PMIV0104 eusb2 repeater support, QCS8300 eDP PHY support
  - Update: Qualcomm UFS PHY and PLL regulator load support
- Ethernet – Support Ethernet function for IPQ9574 SoC
- WiFi – Qualcomm/Atheros (ath10k): GTK rekey fixes
- ASoC – Support for Qualcomm Glymur and PM4125
- Coresight – Add Qualcomm Trace Network On Chip driver support
- Trusted Execution Environment – Add Qualcomm TEE driver (QTEE)
- Device driver updates
  - Allowlist the uefisec application, to provide UEFI variable access on Dell Inspiron 7441 and Latitude 7455, the Hamoa EVK, and the Lenovo Thinkbook 16.
  - Disable tzmem on the SC7180 platform, as this causes problems with rmtfs.
  - Clean up unused, lingering, parameters in the MDT loader API.
  - Unconditinally clear TCS trigger bit, to avoid false completion IRQs in the RPMh/RSC driver. Fix endianess issue in SMEM driver.
  - Add pd-mapper support for SM8750.
  - Introduce support for loading firmware into the QUP serial engines from Linux, which allows deferring selection of which protocol (uart, i2c, spi, etc) a given SE should have until the OS loads.
  - Introduce the “object invoke” interface in the SCM driver to provide an interface to the Qualcomm TEE driver.
- Arm64 device tree updates
  - IPQ5424 – CPU frequency scaling and a missing UART.
  - SM8976 – Touch keys are enabled on the BQ Aquaris X5 Plus.
  - QCM2290 – Video accelerator enabled, and so are HS timing modes for eMMC.
  - SM6150 (previously QCS615) – CPU frequency scaling and the WiFi PCIe controller is introduced.
  - QRB220 RB1 – The venus video accelerator is enabled.
  - SC7280 / QCS6490
    - The first PCIe controller and PHY is introduced. SoundWire, LPASS, and USB offload support is added, the codecs and sound card is then described on the QCM6490 IDP.
    - The MDSS core reset is introduced, to clear bootloader configuration on SC7280-based devices.
    - On Fairphone5, USB audio offload is added.
    - AudioReach support is introduced and used to enable sound on the RB3 Gen2 board.
  - SC8180X – The video clock controller is added
  - SC8280XP – The GPI DMA controllers are described and enabled.
  - SDM632 – Display and GPU is enabled for the Fairphone 3 and charging is enabled on the Google Pixel 3a.
  - SDM850 – The routing for the second USB connector on the Lenovo Yoga C630 is described.
  - SM6150 – ADSP and CDSP FastRPC is introduced, as is the video encoder/decoder (venus).
  - SM6350 – RPMh statistics are enabled, the USB audio offload DAI is introduced and on Fairphone4 the USB audio offload support is enabled.
  - SM8450 – QRD the PMIC GLINK is described, to add USB Type-C and battery functionality.
  - SM8650
    - ACD levels are added for the GPU
    - Camera and video clock controllers power-domains are updated on SM8450, SM8550, and SM8650, now that support for multiple power-domains is accepted.
  - SM8750 – Gains bwmon support for dynamic bus scaling, and PCIe nodes.
  - The DWC3 glue and core nodes are flattened on a number of platforms.
  - USB Type-C DisplayPort support is extended to 4 lanes (from 2) on a variety of platforms, now that the QMP PHY driver supports this.
  - Platform-specific RPMh PD constants are replaced with generic constants wherever possible.
  - IPQ5018
    - Crypto, tsens, rng, SPI NAND support is added, the two MDIO buses are added and the internal GE PHY.
    - Another set of UART and I2C controllers are added.
  - Lemans Auto (previously SA8775P)
    - Name change to reduce confusion about the chip name
    - The IoT memory map introduced and made the default; GDSP FastRPC and GPR nodes are added.
    - SDHCI and the camera subsystem are introduced, the USB controllers are updated to the new flattened binding.
    - The Lemans EVK gains Ethernet definition, more QUP controllers and their GPI DMA engines are defined. PCIe, SDHCI, remoteproc and iris video accelerator are added as well.
  - Monaco (QCS8300)
    - Scaling of L3 and DDR bandwidth is introduced. So is eMMC support and generic packer router (GPR).
    - On the Monaco Ride board, the eMMC controller is enabled.
    - GPU and GMU are introduced, the USB controller nodes are updated to the new flattened binding. The GPU is enabled on the EVK and the Ride boards.
  - MSM8916 – SDCC and MDSS resets are defined
  - MSM8939 – Gets the MDSS reset
  - QCM2290 – Camera clock interface is added.
  - QCS615 – tsens and related thermal-zones are introduced.
  - SDM845
    - The OnePlus 6 smartphone gains a notifications LED, and the sensor core (SLPI) is enabled on the Samsung Galaxy S9.
    - Cheza development boards are removed, as they are no longer in use.
  - SM8750 MTP – WiFi and Bluetooth are enabled
  - Snapdragon X Elite (and derivatives)
    - The PM8010 is disabled by default, removing boot splats on a variety of boards without this PMIC, the video clock controller is added.
    - For the X Elite and X Plus CRDs, and the Lenovo Thinkpad T14s, HBR3 is marked as valid for the external DisplayPorts. The fingerprint reader found on the CRDs are enabled. The PCIe x8 slot on the QCP is enabled.
    - The two Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 gains WiFi and Bluetooth support.
    - GPU support is added for the X Plus SoC.
    - The IRIS video accelerator is introduced and enabled on a variety of laptops.
  - DisplayPort controllers on a variety of boards are updated to describe additional pixel clocks, used for MST.
- Arm32 device tree updates
  - MSM8960 – Bring a few updates to the MSM8960 platform and add support for the Sony Xperia SP.
  - Touch keys support is added to the Samsung Galaxy Grand 2.
  - A number of DeviceTree cleanups.
- Arm64 defconfig updates for Linux 6.18
  - The Qualcomm X Plus platform gained GPU support, enable the required clock controller.
  - The support for Qualcomm QCS615 platform improved, enable the multimedia-related clock controllers.
- New Devices
  - Hamoa IoT SOM and the Hamoa EVK board based on Snapdragon X Elite (x1e80100)
  - HP Omnibook X14 laptop
  - Particle Tachyon board
  - Samsung Galaxy S22 (SM-S901E), Samsung Galaxy S20
  - Lenovo Thinkbook 16
  - Dell Inspiron 7441, Dell Latitude 7455,
  - Billion Capture+
  - Monaco EVK (QCS8300) and Lemans EVK.
MediaTek
- Serial – 8250_mtk: Enable baud clock and manage in runtime PM
- Networking – Add support for MediaTek PCIe 5G HP DRMR-H01
- Maibox
  - Add new GPUEB mailbox driver
  - mdq: remove pm_runtime calls from send_data
  - gce: make clock-names optional
- PCIe Gen3 controller driver
  - Add optional sys clock ready time setting to avoid sys_clk_rdy signal glitching in MT6991 and MT8196
  - Add DT binding and driver support for MT6991 and MT8196
- WiFi – mt76
  - HW restart improvements
  - MLO support
- I2C
  - Add support for the MediaTek MT8196 Chromebook SoC and for its close relative, the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 MT6991 SoC.
  - Add host support for MediaTek MT6878
- Clock driver – Add a new compatible for the MediaTek MT8196 SoC, fully compatible with MT6765
- New device – N/A
Other new Arm hardware platforms and SoCs
- Apple – M2 Pro, M2 Max, and M2 Ultra, used in the 2022/2023 generation of high-end workstations and laptops from Apple. Linux has been working on these for a while, but still requires patches.
- Aspeed – 5x BMC boards using 32-bit ASpeed SoCs
- Axis – Artpec8 is an Armv8 chip based on the Samsung Exynos design
- Broadcom – 3x network routers using IXP4xx (ARMv5!) and Broadcom bcm4708 (ARMv7) SoCs
- NXP
  - i.MX91 single Cortex-A55 SoC
  - TQ Embedded TQMa91xx system-on-modules based on NXP i.MX91 CPU on an LGA or socketable type board. MBa91xxCA is a starterkit base board for TQMa91xx on an adapter board.
  - TQ Embedded TQMLS1012AL SoM using NXP LS1012A CPU. MBLS1012AL is a carrier reference design.
  - Ultratronik Ultra-MACH SBC based on the NXP i.MX8M Plus SoC with 2GB LPDDR4
- Renesas – RZ/T2H (r9a09g077m44), RZ/N2H (r9a09g087m44), RZ/T2H (r9a09g077), and RZ/N2H (r9a09g087) industrial embedded SoCs based on Cortex-A55 cores; reference boards
- Xilinx – Add support for Kria K24, KR260, and KD240 CCs
Raspberry Pi-specific changes
- Assign clocks rates for the Ethernet controller for the Raspberry Pi 5 systems
- Add an ethernet0 alias to allow client programs consuming that alias to populate the correct Ethernet address for the Raspberry Pi 5 systems
- Describe the VGIC interrupt line such that KVM can be used on Raspberry Pi 5 systems.
- drm/v3d – create a dedicated lock for dma fence – Don’t mix dma fence lock with the active_job lock. Use fence_lock to protect the dma fence used by drm scheduler when signalling a job
  completion and queue_lock to protect concurrent access to active bin job in OOM and stats collection for a given file priv. The issue was uncovered when PREEMPT_RT on with a system freeze when opening multiple Chromium tabs on Raspberry Pi 5.
- Convert Raspberry Pi firmware 7″ touchscreen controller device tree binding to json-schema.
- Add support for Raspberry Pi RP1 ethernet controller
- Enable the RP1 pinctrl driver for the Pi 5
- Adds the pin controller node(s), an additional GPIO controller, the second SDHCI controller node for SDIO Wi-Fi, and the UARTA for Bluetooth to the BCM2712 DTS (Raspberry Pi 5)
- Enable USB devicetree entries for Rpi5

RISC-V updates in Linux 6.18

We have many changes for RISC-V in Linux 6.18, partially due to issues with the quality and timing of patchsets for Linux 6.17, which ended up being rejected by Linus Torvalds. Those have been reworked and merged into Linux 6.18 along with other updates.

Replacement of __ASSEMBLY__ with __ASSEMBLER__ in header files (other architectures have already merged this type of cleanup)
The introduction of ioremap_wc() for RISC-V
Cleanup of the RISC-V kprobes code to use mostly-extant macros rather than open code
A RISC-V kprobes unit test
An architecture-specific endianness swap macro set implementation, leveraging some dedicated RISC-V instructions for this purpose if they are available
The ability to identity and communicate to userspace the presence of a MIPS P8700-specific ISA extension, and to leverage its MIPS-specific PAUSE implementation in cpu_relax()
Support for the RISC-V-standardized RPMI interface. RPMI is a platform management communication mechanism between OSes running on application processors, and a remote platform management processor. Similar to ARM SCMI, TI SCI, etc. This includes irqchip, mailbox, and clk changes.
Support for the RISC-V-standardized MPXY SBI extension. MPXY is a RISC-V-specific standard implementing a shared memory mailbox between S-mode operating systems (e.g., Linux) and M-mode firmware (e.g., OpenSBI). It is part of this PR since one of its use cases is to enable M-mode firmware to act as a single RPMI client for all RPMI activity on a core (including S-mode RPMI activity). Includes a mailbox driver.
Some ACPI-related updates to enable the use of RPMI and MPXY.
The addition of Linux-wide memcpy_{from,to}_le32() static inline functions, for RPMI use.
An ACPI Kconfig change to enable boot logos on any ACPI-using architecture (including RISC-V)
A RISC-V defconfig change to add GPIO keyboard and event device support, for front panel shutdown or reboot buttons
Several miscellaneous cleanups
ESWIN – Added support for EIC7700 SoC, consisting of SiFive Quad-Core P550 CPU cluster and the first development board that uses it, the SiFive HiFive Premier P550
Microchip
- Add support for Microchip PolarFire SoC Discovery Kit with PolarFire SoC MPFS095T
- Add support for the non-engineering sample Icicle kit.
SiFive – Support for SiFive vendor-specific extensions in the binding file for extensions. These currently only see use in the SBI implementation.
Sophgo
- Add Sophgo CV1800 (CV18XX/SG200X) USB phy
- Driver for the Sophgo SG2042 PCIe controller
- Device tree change – SG2042L Enable numa and we can see significant performance improvements, for example, in the STREAM test.
SpacemiT
- Clock driver
  - Convert to use clk_ops::determine_rate()
  - Fix parent clocks of SSPA in SpacemiT driver
- SpacemiT P1 PMIC – RTC and regulators drivers
- SpacemiT K1
  - PDMA controller support, Ethernet MAC driver
  - Enable the MMP_PDMA driver as a module in defconfig builds, where it is needed by Spacemit K1 boards.
- Device tree changes
  - Add reset support to UART driver
  - Remove sec_uart1 node
- New board – Orange Pi RV2 board
StarFive
- Add Milk-V Mars CM and CM Lite system-on-modules (JH7110)
- Several cleanups done to the common JH7110 dtsi file, some relating to properties used by U-Boot or encountered during U-Boot development.
- Binding and devicetree node for the memory controller (DMC) on the JH7110.

Changes to the MIPS architecture

There’s still some minimal activity for the MIPS architecture. Summary:

switch longson32 platform to DT and use MIPS_GENERIC framework
cleanups/fixes for lantiq DTs
other cleanups and fixes

Extract from the longer log:

mips: math-emu: replace deprecated strcpy() in me-debugfs
MIPS: configs: Consolidate Loongson1 defconfigs
MIPS: Unify Loongson1 PRID_REV
MIPS: loongson32: Switch to generic core
MIPS: loongson: Add built-in DTB support
MIPS: dts: loongson: Add CQ-T300B board
MIPS: dts: loongson: Add Smartloong-1C board
MIPS: dts: loongson: Add LSGZ_1B_DEV board
MIPS: dts: loongson: Add LS1B-DEMO board
dt-bindings: mips: loongson: Add LS1B-DEMO and CQ-T300B
mips: lantiq: danube: rename stp node on EASY50712 reference board
mips: lantiq: xway: sysctrl: rename stp clock
MIPS: RB532: Replace deprecated strcpy() with memcpy() and strscpy()
MIPS: Loongson64: Replace deprecated strcpy() with strscpy_pad()
MIPS: generic: Replace deprecated strcpy() in ocelot_detect()
MIPS: octeon: Replace deprecated strcpy() in octeon_model_get_string_buffer()
MIPS: octeon: Replace memset(0) + deprecated strcpy() with strscpy_pad()
MIPS: arc: Replace deprecated strcpy() with memcpy()
MIPS: txx9: Replace deprecated strcpy() with strscpy()
MIPS: sni: Replace deprecated strcpy() in sni_console_setup()

For even more details, you can read the Linux 6.18 changelog generated with the command git log v6.17..v6.18-rc7 --stat to only show commit messages (no cde). As usual, you can also check out Kernelnewbies for a broader list of changes to the latest Linux 6.18 kernel.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

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.