Intel recently announced Starfire as their new Panther Lake derived, space-grade SoC designed for extreme environments... like survivability in space. With the Linux 7.3, we are going to begin seeing the first Intel Starfire specific patches land in the kernel.

Intel announced the space-grade Starfire SoC in July and with engineering samples to begin shipping this quarter. These USA-manufactured 18A SoCs are designed for extreme environments and where Linux is more common than Windows.

Queued up this past week into the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem's edac-for-next Git branch is this patch adding Intel Starfire SoC support. From the EDAC perspective with the memory architecture, Starfire is very close to Panther Lake and re-using the existing codepaths in the IGEN6 driver. Just a new device ID is ultimately needed for Starfire support for the error detection and correction handling.

This is the first patch seen so far for Intel Starfire on Linux. More patches are expected and likely will be largely adding new device IDs and otherwise following the existing Panther Lake driver support code paths. It's also possible Starfire is effectively the same as the previously noted "rugged" Panther Lake in the Linux kernel.

In any event with the Intel Panther Lake Linux support being in good standing at this point, the Starfire Linux support should be in good shape too once all the necessary device ID additions are in place. It's also worth mentioning that Intel's Starfire isn't the only "Starfire" in the Linux kernel space as there is also the existing Adaptec Starfire network driver in the mainline Linux kernel.