Motorola CPCAP and MDM6600 USB PHYs for Droid-era smartphones
Two small pieces of glue for Motorola "Mapphone" smartphones from around 2012, most famously the Droid 4: one drives the USB transceiver inside the CPCAP power-management chip, and the other handles the USB link to the MDM6600 cellular modem. Together they let the phone's USB port and built-in modem work on mainline Linux.
recommendation
Worth keeping but document its niche, because the hardware it supports — Motorola Droid 4 and its siblings from around 2012 — is long out of production and only kept alive by hobbyists (notably the postmarketOS community, which still flags the Droid 4 as not recommended). The code is not abandoned; both files received upstream attention as recently as 2025, and there is no replacement driver that handles the same board-specific USB wiring, so removing it would strand the remaining users without benefit.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Both files in this directory were still touched in upstream phy-next work in 2026, indicating the code is not abandoned even if the change was largely treewide.
- cateee.net
CONFIG_PHY_CPCAP_USB is the CPCAP PMIC USB PHY driver for Motorola phones/tablets such as the Droid 4, and remains present through current kernel releases.
- cateee.net
CONFIG_PHY_MAPPHONE_MDM6600 is the Motorola Mapphone MDM6600 modem USB PHY driver for devices such as the Droid 4, and remains present through current kernel releases.
- en.wikipedia.org
The Motorola Droid 4 was released on 2012-02-10, placing the supported hardware firmly in a legacy smartphone generation.
- wiki.postmarketos.org
There is still niche community deployment on legacy Motorola Droid 4 hardware, but the device is marked as not recommended for future use and remains downstream/non-mainline in postmarketOS.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver directory: two platform PHY drivers with module entry points for Motorola CPCAP USB PHY and MDM6600 modem USB PHY. Static prompt metadata already shows 9 substantive commits in the last 5 years with most recent substantive touch on 2025-02-17, so this is not dead code. Source acquisition: the lore URL came from the `lore_activity` MCP query on each .c file; both files show a 2026 phy-next touch, supporting continued upstream maintenance attention. The two LKDDb URLs were obtained via `web.search_query` and identify the supported hardware as Motorola phones/tablets such as Droid 4. The Wikipedia Droid 4 URL was obtained via `web.search_query` and dates the hardware to 2012, which supports `hardware_still_sold_new_in_2025=false` and a low last-widely-available year. The postmarketOS Wiki URL was obtained via `web.search_query` and supports `deployments_today="low"`: there is niche enthusiast use, but not meaningful new deployment. I found no concrete removal evidence within the tool budget: a directory-level `lore_file_timeline` query returned no matches for the path prefix, and a removal-oriented `lore_regex` subject query timed out, so I did not escalate to `remove`. Recommendation is `keep-annotate`: annotate as legacy/mobile-niche hardware rather than deprecate, because the hardware is obsolete in the market but still sees occasional upstream care and community use, and there is no obvious drop-in replacement driver for the same board-specific wiring.