drivers/clk/ux500 · keep-annotate

ST-Ericsson Ux500 (NovaThor U8500) SoC clock controller

Clock controller support for ST-Ericsson's Ux500 / NovaThor U8500 family, the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 mobile SoC with its companion AB8500 power-management chip that powered a handful of 2011-2013 smartphones and tablets such as the Sony Xperia U, Xperia P, and Samsung Galaxy S III mini.

keep-annotate conf=0.82 last_sold=2013 deploy=low replacement=none subsystem=clk category=platform-vendor

82%

recommendation

Worth keeping but documenting as legacy because the hardware is over a decade old and ST-Ericsson dissolved in 2013, yet the code is still receiving routine upstream maintenance (a Linaro cleanup landed in February 2024) and the postmarketOS community keeps these phones alive. Since this is the SoC-specific clock controller, no replacement driver is possible; removing it would simply drop Ux500 support entirely, so the sensible course is to leave it in place and flag it as serving only hobbyist legacy devices.

repository signals

10 files

1,851 source lines

12 commits, 5y

+648 / −307 lines added / removed, 5y

6 authors, 5y

monthly commits · 2021-04-21 → 2026-04-21 · 12 total · active in 7/61 months

sources

lore.kernel.org
Lore activity for drivers/clk/ux500/u8500_of_clk.c shows ongoing upstream maintenance, with newest hit on 2024-02-08 as part of clk API updates.
en.wikipedia.org
NovaThor U8500 was a 2011-era smartphone/tablet SoC; ST-Ericsson split up in 2013 and the listed U8500 devices are old handsets rather than current products.
cateee.net
LKDDb still lists U8500/Ux500 architecture support and this clock driver's device bindings in current kernel series, indicating the platform remains upstream-supported.
wiki.postmarketos.org
A current postmarketOS wiki entry still tracks a NovaThor U8500 phone released in 2012, which is evidence of residual hobbyist/legacy deployment rather than new commercial deployment.

codex reasoning notes (technical)

Local `rg` inspection of the directory found U8500/AB8500 identifiers and DT compatibles `stericsson,u8500-clks` and `stericsson,ab8500-clk`, confirming a real SoC clock driver. `lore_file_timeline` on `drivers/clk/ux500/u8500_of_clk.c` returned continued activity through 2024; prompt metadata adds a substantive directory touch on 2025-09-08, so this does not look abandoned and I found no concrete removal evidence. Web search opened Wikipedia/LKDDb pages and a postmarketOS search result showing the hardware is a 2011-2013 smartphone family with only legacy enthusiast use left. No natural replacement exists because this is the SoC-specific clock driver for Ux500 itself, so the defensible stance is keep the driver but annotate it as legacy/obsolete hardware.