With Linus Torvalds back to work, merged to mainline on Wednesday were the RISC-V architecture updates for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel cycle.
One of the features for RISC-V with Linux 6.8 is restoring XIP kernel support. XIP is the option for allowing the Linux Kernel to “Execute In Place” from ROM. Carrying out a RISC-V “CONFIG_XIP_KERNEL” build allows for placing the kernel on non-volatile storage directly addressable by the CPU. The XIP’ed kernel on storage such as NOR flash can then be directly executed in place with the text section of the kernel not needing to be loaded from flash to RAM. Only read-write sections like the kernel’s data section and stack are copied to RAM.