Arm AMBA bus core and NVIDIA Tegra AHB support
Core kernel plumbing for Arm's AMBA family of on-chip buses (AHB, APB, AXI), the standard interconnect inside nearly every Arm-based SoC, plus a small driver for the AHB bridge found on NVIDIA Tegra processors used in Jetson developer boards and embedded products. Without it, the kernel could not enumerate or talk to the IP blocks (UARTs, timers, controllers) wired into Arm chips.
recommendation
It should stay because AMBA is still the foundational on-chip interconnect for virtually every modern Arm SoC, and the directory also covers NVIDIA's Tegra AHB bridge, which remains in use on Jetson Orin and similar modules that NVIDIA continues to sell in 2025. Upstream activity as recent as 2026 shows the code is actively maintained rather than legacy, and there is no replacement that could absorb its role.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
`drivers/amba/bus.c` had upstream work in 2026 (`amba: use generic driver_override infrastructure`), indicating the directory is still maintained rather than abandoned.
- lore.kernel.org
`drivers/amba/tegra-ahb.c` still appears in 2026 stable-tree traffic, consistent with ongoing support for deployed Tegra systems.
- arm.com
Arm still presents AMBA as a current system architecture for modern Arm-based systems, so the underlying bus technology is not obsolete in 2025/2026.
- developer.nvidia.com
NVIDIA still lists Jetson Orin modules and developer hardware, showing Tegra-family SoCs remain in new deployments.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local tree inspection via shell showed this directory contains the generic AMBA bus core (`bus.c`) plus a Tegra AHB driver (`tegra-ahb.c`), so it is a real driver directory. Lore evidence was gathered with `lore_file_timeline` on both files; it showed fresh 2026 activity and no removal-oriented signal in the checked history. Deployment evidence came from `web.open` on Arm's AMBA page and `web.search_query` on NVIDIA Jetson hardware pages. Because AMBA remains a foundational Arm bus and Tegra hardware is still sold, there is no natural replacement and removal/deprecation is not justified.