Samsung Sensorhub for Gear 2 and Gear S Wearables
An SPI-attached sensor hub microcontroller that Samsung used inside its 2014-era Tizen smartwatches, including the Gear 2 (codename Rinato) and a thermostat variant. It aggregates motion and environmental sensor data from the watch's onboard chips and feeds it to the host Exynos 3250 SoC.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as legacy because the only hardware it supports is a decade-old Samsung wearable line that is no longer sold, yet the code is still receiving upstream maintenance and is actively used by the postmarketOS community to keep Gear 2 watches running mainline Linux. There is no generic replacement that would cover this board-specific sensor hub, so removal would simply break those niche deployments.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The driver is still seeing upstream maintenance in 2026; recent linux-iio patches touch ssp_sensors/ssp_dev.c rather than proposing removal.
- cateee.net
LKDDb maps CONFIG_IIO_SSP_SENSORHUB to this directory and lists only two DT compatibles: samsung,sensorhub-rinato and samsung,sensorhub-thermostat.
- en.wikipedia.org
Samsung Gear 2 (codename Rinato) is a 2014 Exynos 3250 smartwatch, indicating the known supported hardware is an old wearable platform rather than current-volume hardware.
- wiki.postmarketos.org
Current community deployment is niche but nonzero: postmarketOS still documents Samsung Gear 2 mainline work and notes the sensor hub remains relevant on that device.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local tree inspection (rg/sed) showed this is a real SPI/IIO Samsung Sensorhub driver with OF matches samsung,sensorhub-rinato and samsung,sensorhub-thermostat, not just a helper library. lore_file_timeline on drivers/iio/common/ssp_sensors/ssp_dev.c returned multiple 2026 cleanup/fix patches and no removal signal, so this is not a removal candidate despite old hardware. Web search produced LKDDb plus Samsung Gear 2 / postmarketOS pages; together they point to legacy Samsung wearable hardware, no evidence of new 2025 sales, but some hobbyist/community deployments remain. No natural generic replacement driver exists for the same board-specific sensorhub, so keep the driver but annotate it as legacy/niche rather than deprecating or removing it.