TI Sitara and DaVinci LCD Controller (tilcdc)
The simple LCD controller block built into Texas Instruments' Sitara AM335x, DaVinci DA8xx, and OMAP-L1xx SoCs, which drives parallel RGB panels on embedded and industrial boards including the long-running BeagleBone Black. It replaced an older framebuffer driver and is the standard way these chips push pixels to a screen on Linux.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting its niche, because it serves a specific class of TI ARM SoCs rather than mainstream graphics hardware. Upstream activity is healthy — there were modernization patches under review on dri-devel as recently as 2026 — and TI itself still sells AM335x-based boards like the BeagleBone Black and ships updated Linux SDKs for them, so real users would lose display output if it were dropped.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The driver was still receiving non-trivial upstream maintenance in 2026, including a v5 drm/tilcdc cleanup/modernization patch reviewed on dri-devel.
- ti.com
A BeagleBone Black based on AM335x was still listed as an orderable product, indicating new hardware using this display block remained on sale.
- ti.com
TI was still publishing and updating a Linux Processor SDK for AM335x in late 2025/early 2026, consistent with ongoing vendor support and deployed use.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection (`rg`, `sed`) in this tree shows `tilcdc` is the TI LCDC DRM driver for `ti,am33xx-tilcdc` and `ti,da850-tilcdc`; Kconfig also names AM33xx/DA8xx/OMAP-L1xx and notes the old fbdev predecessor. `lore_file_timeline` on the directory returned no hits, so I fell back to `lore_activity(file=drivers/gpu/drm/tilcdc/tilcdc_drv.c,since=5y)`, which returned 32 recent touches including 2026 patch series URLs above; that argues against deprecation/removal. A follow-up lore/web search for removal discussion produced no positive removal evidence. TI product pages were obtained via web search and show both an orderable BeagleBone Black (AM335x) and a recently updated AM335x Linux SDK, so the hardware looks niche/industrial/legacy but still sold and deployed. Because the IP is old and usage is not broad consumer growth, but upstream and vendor signals are still active, `keep-annotate` fits better than deprecate/remove.