Actions Semi OWL S500/S700/S900 SoC pin controller
Pin multiplexing and GPIO support for Actions Semiconductor's OWL family of ARM SoCs (S500, S700, and S900), which powered mid-2010s maker boards and single-board computers such as the Roseapple Pi and the 96Boards Bubblegum-96. The chip controls how each SoC pin is routed to internal peripherals like UARTs, I2C, or general-purpose I/O.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting its niche, because the underlying SoCs were last widely available around 2016 and only ever shipped in modest hobbyist and 96Boards developer hardware. The code is still receiving upstream maintenance in 2025 (a vivo engineer modernized its clock handling and it was swept up in a Linaro GPIO API cleanup), so removing it would break working boards still in users' hands while saving little.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The driver still receives upstream maintenance in 2025; this patch updates the Actions pinctrl code to use devm_clk_get_enabled().
- lore.kernel.org
The driver was part of a 2025 GPIO callback modernization series, indicating continued core API upkeep rather than abandonment.
- prnewswire.com
Actions announced the S900 and its reference platform in May 2015, showing this hardware family is from the mid-2010s.
- cnx-software.com
The S500 family appeared in 2015 SBCs such as Roseapple Pi, indicating deployment was centered on older maker/dev-board products.
- cnx-software.com
Bubblegum-96, a notable S900 board, only appears in period launch/sales coverage from 2016, supporting the view that broad availability peaked years ago.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local tree inspection via exec_command showed this is the Actions Semi OWL pinctrl driver for SoCs S500/S700/S900, so it is a real hardware driver. lore_activity on drivers/pinctrl/actions/pinctrl-owl.c returned 2025 maintenance patches (URLs above), which argues against deprecation/removal and supports keep-annotate. Web search found only mid-2010s launch and board-sale evidence (PRNewswire, CNX), with no sign of current-volume new products; that supports hardware_still_sold_new_in_2025=false, low present-day deployments, and an estimated widely-available peak ending around 2016. No natural replacement driver exists because pinctrl support is SoC-specific; the realistic replacement is newer hardware, not another upstream driver.