Nuvoton WPCM450, NPCM7xx, NPCM8xx, and MA35D1 pin controllers
Pin multiplexing and GPIO control for Nuvoton's server baseboard management controller (BMC) chips — the older WPCM450, the widely-deployed NPCM7xx (iBMC), the newer NPCM8xx — and for the MA35D1 ARM Cortex-A35 industrial/edge IoT microprocessor family. These chips sit on server motherboards and embedded boards, where this code routes signals to the right pins and exposes general-purpose I/O lines.
recommendation
It should stay because Nuvoton still actively sells all the SoC families it supports: the NPCM7xx iBMC line, the MA35D1 edge MPU, and the NPCM8xx, which Nuvoton announced for customer sampling as recently as 2025. Upstream maintenance is also current, with patches touching the MA35D1 portion in March 2025, so the code matches hardware shipping today.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Recent upstream work in 2025 touched the Nuvoton pinctrl driver family, indicating active maintenance rather than removal.
- nuvoton.com
Nuvoton still markets the MA35D1 MPU family, one of the SoC families covered by this driver directory.
- nuvoton.com
Nuvoton still markets the NPCM7xxR iBMC family, another SoC family covered by this driver directory.
- nuvoton.com
Nuvoton announced NPCM8mnx BMC certification in 2025 and stated the chip is available for customer sampling/evaluation, showing current deployment relevance for the NPCM8xx line.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local exec_command on drivers/pinctrl/nuvoton identified active driver code for WPCM450, NPCM7xx, NPCM8xx, and MA35D1. lore_file_timeline on pinctrl-ma35d1.c returned a 2025 linux-gpio patch URL showing recent upstream maintenance. Web search found current Nuvoton MA35D1 and NPCM7xx product pages plus a 2025 NPCM8mnx news page. No concrete removal-series evidence was found; attempted broader lore removal scans timed out. Because the directory covers still-marketed Nuvoton BMC/MPU families and upstream activity remains recent, deprecation is not justified.