Toshiba ET8EK8 5-megapixel camera sensor (Nokia N900)
A Toshiba 5-megapixel raw image sensor that talked to its host over I2C and was paired with the OMAP3 camera pipeline. Its only widely shipped use was as the rear camera of the 2009 Nokia N900 (RX-51) Linux smartphone.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting its niche, because the only known device using this sensor is the 2009 Nokia N900 smartphone. It is not abandoned code: maintainers were still touching it in 2025 and 2026 with V4L2 API conversions and a device-tree CRC patch, and postmarketOS keeps the N900 alive as a hobbyist platform, so removing it would break a small but real community of legacy users.
repository signals
sources
- git.kernel.org
Kernel Kconfig identifies this as support for the Toshiba ET8EK8 5 MP camera sensor and says it is used for example in the Nokia N900 (RX-51).
- lore.kernel.org
The driver was still being updated in 2026 as part of a large V4L2 subdev API conversion touching et8ek8_driver.c; this is active maintenance, not abandonment.
- lore.kernel.org
A 2025 patch adds device-tree CRC configuration support specifically to et8ek8_driver, indicating current upstream interest in keeping the driver usable.
- wiki.postmarketos.org
postmarketOS still tracks the Nokia N900 on recent kernels, with camera support marked partial; this suggests surviving hobbyist/legacy deployments rather than none.
- en.wikipedia.org
The Nokia N900 was released in November 2009, was a retail product of that era, and by 2023 support is described as mainly community-maintained via postmarketOS, consistent with legacy-only deployments today.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
No removal discussion surfaced from lore-first checks; lore_file_timeline and lore_activity showed steady 2025-2026 maintenance, including a dedicated ET8EK8 feature patch and broad media API updates. That argues against deprecate/remove and supports keep-annotate for legacy hardware. Hardware evidence points to a single known example platform, the 2009 Nokia N900, with present-day community OS support but no meaningful new-hardware market, so sold-new=false, deployments=low, and last widely available year estimated as 2010. Source acquisition: Kconfig URL via canonical recall of git.kernel.org tree path; lore URLs obtained from lore_file_timeline/lore_activity; N900 deployment/age URLs obtained via web search.