Linux 7.2 Power Management: SpacemiT K1 RISC‑V Gets Thermal Sensors, NVIDIA Adds ACPI CPPC v4 for Vera
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Linux 7.2 Power Management: SpacemiT K1 RISC‑V Gets Thermal Sensors, NVIDIA Adds ACPI CPPC v4 for Vera
The power management corner of the Linux kernel has picked up an unusually full slate of changes heading into version 7.2: new sensor and CPU‑frequency support for budget and embedded silicon, a fresh ACPI standard from NVIDIA ahead of its Vera CPU, and the retirement of a CPUFreq driver for hardware older than most of its users.
SpacemiT K1 picks up mainline thermal monitoring
The Chinese RISC‑V chipmaker SpacemiT’s K1 SoC now has a thermal sensor driver in the mainline kernel, giving the chip proper temperature reporting across multiple zones on the die rather than relying on out‑of‑tree vendor patches. Several K1‑based development boards are gaining matching upstream support for this and other functionality, including the Milk‑V Jupiter and Orange Pi RV2, alongside improvements to eMMC, USB, and PCIe handling on those boards.
SpacemiT K3 expands peripheral support
The newer 8‑core K3 RVA23 RISC‑V SoC from the same family is gaining working USB 2.0 support in the mainline kernel for 7.2, along with PWM support, functional PDMA, and a fix for I/O power handling in the pin control code. Device Tree work also lands for two new K3‑powered boards.
NVIDIA contributes ACPI CPPC v4 ahead of Vera
An NVIDIA engineer has authored support for ACPI CPPC v4 (Collaborative Processor Performance Control), the latest revision of the standard governing how the OS and platform coordinate CPU frequency and power behavior. The headline addition is an “OSPM nominal performance” register: the operating system can tell the platform what it considers a baseline performance level, with anything reported above that threshold treated as turbo/boost behavior and anything below it handled as power- or temperature-driven throttling. The patch also defines a resource-priority mechanism for ranking processors’ access to shared resources like cache and memory bandwidth, though full parsing of that structure isn’t implemented yet. The work is tied to NVIDIA’s upcoming Vera CPU platform, but since it sits in the kernel’s common CPPC code, any vendor supporting CPPC v4 can use it.
AMD Elan SoC CPUFreq driver retired
As part of the kernel’s broader cleanup of legacy i486‑era support, the CPUFreq driver for AMD’s Elan SC4 system‑on‑chips, hardware dating back to the 1990s, has been removed.
Qualcomm’s entry-level IoT SoC gains CPUFreq scaling
The Qualcomm Shikra/QCM2390, an entry-level chip aimed at IoT and embedded devices, now has CPUFreq frequency-scaling support in the mainline kernel.
Intel’s thermal driver covers more Arrow Lake CPUs
The intel_tcc_cooling driver has been extended to recognize additional Arrow Lake CPU models, broadening which chips get proper thermal throttling control out of the box.
All of the above has already been merged into the relevant subsystem trees feeding Linux’s Git mainline for the 7.2 merge window. Once Linux 7.2 ships, the changes will reach end users the usual way: through each distribution’s regular kernel updates, with no separate action needed beyond updating to a 7.2-based kernel package.
