The Linux 6.1 kernel has incorporated a large number of EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface, Extensible Firmware Interface) new feature codes.

The commit information shows that the code for these new EFI features includes LoongArch EFI Boot, so Linux 6.1 for LoongArch architecture is ready to support LoongArch EFI Boot. This is the official addition of support for the LoongArch processor architecture following the UEFI 2.10 specification in August.

Although the LoongArch CPU architecture has been incorporated as early as Linux 5.19, the features in the initial support phase are very limited, and even some key device drivers are missing – so at the time Linux 5.19 does not yet support booting on devices with LoongArch CPUs.

But the state of Linux 5.19 is at least good enough to unblock the glibc LoongArch mainline.Since then, the Loongson team has also been actively working for Linux kernels are able to merge their code into the mainline and continue the effort.

Currently in Linux 6.1, LoongArch supports EFI booting. The maintainers also cleaned up Linux’s EFI code a bit along the way, and prepared for future use of EFI code to provide support for confidential computing.

This EFI pull for Linux 6.1 also includes generic compressed boot support, kernel command line measure to TPM for measured boot processing, and several other improvements.