Linux 3.7 Now Supports ARM


It's generic ARM.


Until now, to run Linux on ARM, you needed specific patches. Now, you need less patches ^^.
 
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This is actually a kernel architechture thing. Previously the ARM kernels were always built for an exact target board - the single tree (even the one on kernel.org) supports a lot of ARM targets already, but a built binary kernel will only run on a single target - if booted on a different target than the compilation target it would not notice the difference at all and most likely fail more or less spectacularly (or if they added detection, just say "I cant run on this" (if even that would work, the serial ports or lcd or whatever the output for kernel messages is varies a lot between targets) and panic, I actually have not tested).


Now they're adding support for a single kernel to boot on different boards. It is not a big thing for somebody who only targets a single target device, but propably helps a lot on the area of having a single (binary) linux (or android propably) distribution run on different phones & devices without needing to build different kernels.


EDIT: So the "shortened" topic title reads completely wrong. Linux has supported ARM since atleast about the year 2000 with the 2.2 series (I found ARM Linux references to 2.2 so I think that... somebody would go and find the real changelogs to find out when was the first ARM port added to the official tree, but I wont bother.)
 
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