Sony CXD2880 DVB-T/T2 tuner-demodulator
Sony's CXD2880 is a single-chip silicon tuner and demodulator for DVB-T and DVB-T2 terrestrial digital television. It is best known to Linux users as the tuner on the Raspberry Pi TV HAT add-on board, but it also appears in a handful of USB and embedded TV receiver products from the late 2010s onward.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as a low-traffic driver. The Sony CXD2880 is still the tuner chip on the Raspberry Pi TV HAT, which Raspberry Pi continues to sell and document, and the kernel's MAINTAINERS file lists the driver as Supported with a named maintainer. Commit activity has been light (mostly sporadic 2023-2024 fixes plus tree-wide cleanups), so it deserves an annotation noting its niche rather than active removal.
repository signals
sources
- raspberrypi.com
Raspberry Pi still presents the TV HAT as a buyable product, and the page identifies the onboard tuner as Sony CXD2880.
- raspberrypi.com
Current Raspberry Pi documentation describes active setup and use of the TV HAT with the Sony CXD2880 for DVB-T/DVB-T2 reception.
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows CONFIG_DVB_CXD2880 remains present across current kernel series and builds module cxd2880.
- linux.googlesource.com
The kernel MAINTAINERS entry lists MEDIA DRIVERS FOR CXD2880 as Supported with a named maintainer and file patterns covering this directory.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver, not an early-exit case. URLs were obtained via web search/open: Raspberry Pi product page and TV HAT docs, LKDDb page, and a searched MAINTAINERS snapshot on linux.googlesource. Local shell inspection identified the directory as the Sony CXD2880 DVB-T2/T frontend and local `git -c safe.directory=... log -- drivers/media/dvb-frontends/cxd2880` showed only sporadic 2023-2024 maintenance plus later treewide churn; `lei` was unavailable, so lore history could not be queried directly. Given current upstream support metadata and evidence of hardware still being sold/documented, removal is not justified; low activity argues for keep-annotate rather than plain keep.