MIPS Boston development board clock controller
Provides clock signals for the MIPS Boston board, an FPGA-based development platform from Imagination Technologies that succeeded the Malta reference board. It was used by MIPS engineers and developers around 2016-2017 for SoC bring-up and is still emulated by QEMU, but was never a mass-market product.
recommendation
A candidate for future removal because the Boston board is a niche FPGA-based MIPS development platform that was already legacy by 2017, when Imagination Technologies sold off its MIPS business. The directory contains a single small clock provider with almost no real maintenance activity since its 2017 introduction, though QEMU still emulates the board so a few users may rely on it for legacy bring-up or testing. Worth flagging for deprecation rather than immediate removal since no active removal discussion exists upstream.
repository signals
sources
- cateee.net
CONFIG_COMMON_CLK_BOSTON is the clock driver for MIPS Boston boards and is tied to the single Boston board DT compatible.
- qemu.org
Current QEMU still documents Boston board emulation, indicating some ongoing niche lab/emulation use.
- android.googlesource.com
Boston is an FPGA-based MIPS development board, a successor to Malta, not a mass-market product line.
- imaginationtech.com
Imagination completed the sale of its MIPS business in 2017, which strongly suggests Boston-era Imagination MIPS dev hardware was already legacy by then.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection showed this directory contains one real clock provider, clk-boston.c, registered via CLK_OF_DECLARE for DT compatible img,boston-clock. Local shell git history (git log on drivers/clk/imgtec) showed very little real activity: initial 2017 bring-up, two 2018 fixes, then mostly treewide churn, with only a 2025 allocator API conversion as the recent substantive touch. Lore MCP/lei were unavailable here, so I used web search on lore terms and found no removal discussion or active maintenance thread; that argues against 'remove'. Sources obtained via web search: LKDDb for scope, QEMU docs for present-day niche deployment, U-Boot Boston board doc for hardware nature, and Imagination's 2017 MIPS-sale notice to bound likely commercial relevance. Net: old single-board support, not sold new in 2025, still potentially useful in emulation or legacy bring-up, so deprecate rather than remove.