Microchip PolarFire SoC Auto Update firmware service
Handles the firmware-side "Auto Update" service on Microchip's PolarFire SoC FPGAs, a family of RISC-V Linux-capable system-on-chip FPGAs aimed at embedded and industrial designs. It lets Linux running on the SoC re-flash the FPGA bitstream and system controller firmware in the field on boards such as the PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit.
recommendation
It should stay because the PolarFire SoC FPGA family is current hardware that Microchip still actively sells in 2025, including the Icicle Kit and newer PolarFire Core variants, and the driver itself is still receiving real maintenance fixes (a probe fix landed as recently as 2026). Deployment is niche given this is FPGA-management firmware, but there is no replacement and no sign of upstream wanting it gone.
repository signals
sources
- git.kernel.org
Initial upstream addition of the PolarFire SoC Auto Update support driver on 2023-12-06.
- git.kernel.org
Recent substantive maintenance continued through 2026-03-26 with a probe fix for missing flash.
- microchip.com
Microchip still markets the PolarFire SoC FPGA family, including newer PolarFire Core SoC variants, for Linux-capable embedded systems.
- microchip.com
Microchip still advertises current PolarFire SoC kits/platforms such as the Icicle Kit and Video Kit, indicating ongoing new deployments and evaluation usage.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver: `mpfs-auto-update.c` is a platform driver using `module_platform_driver`, inspected locally via `exec_command`. `lore-http` MCP was unavailable in this session and `lei` was not installed, so upstream activity was checked with local `git log`/`git grep` via `exec_command`; no remove/deprecate hits were found for this driver, and substantive fixes continue into 2026. The two kernel.org commit URLs are canonical-recall URLs derived from those local commit hashes. The two Microchip URLs were obtained by `web.search_query` and show the product family and kits are still actively sold/marketed. This is niche FPGA-management hardware, so present-day deployment is low rather than broad, but it is current hardware with active upstream maintenance and no natural replacement driver.