Changes have been accepted into the Linux 7.1 kernel that remove support for AHCI SATA and PCIe controllers used in the Baikal-T1 system-on-a-chip. According to the OpenNET and Phoronix portals, the removal process began with version 7.0, from which the i2c and spi dw drivers had already disappeared. The reason given is the lack of maintenance and incomplete integration of the platform — in particular, the PCIe driver was never brought to a working state.
As www1.ru reported, the production of Baikal chips at TSMC facilities was halted back in 2022. The experiment of packaging Baikal M at GS Nanotech in Kaliningrad was discontinued in November 2025 due to a shortage of crystals.
The Baikal-T1 processor contains two P5600 MIPS 32 r5 cores with a frequency of 1.2 GHz, an L2 cache of 1 MB, a DDR3-1600 ECC controller, a 10Gb Ethernet port, two 1Gb Ethernet ports, PCIe Gen.3 x4, two SATA 3.0 ports, and a hardware crypto accelerator with support for GOST 28147-89. Support for the chip was included in the kernel starting from branch 5.8 and was maintained until the LTS version 6.18. Requests to remove drivers for the timer, memory, physmap, bus, hwmon, dwc, and bt1-rom are also under consideration.
Since 2023, the Linux developer community has stopped accepting patches from Baikal Electronics due to US sanctions. Linus Torvalds supported this decision, and mentions of developers associated with Russia were removed from the MAINTAINERS file.
Read more on the topic:
- Baikal to supply 1.5 million Baikal-U chips under a contract for 1 billion rubles
- New Russian chip based on RISC-V architecture: Baikal Electronics to produce one million Baikal-U microcontrollers in 2026
- Producing Baikal processors in Russia turned out to be impossible
