Intel Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake SoC telemetry interface
A low-level interface exposing power, performance, and event counters on Intel's Goldmont and Goldmont Plus Atom-class SoCs, namely Apollo Lake (2016) and Gemini Lake / Gemini Lake Refresh (2017–2019) used in low-power laptops, Chromebooks, NUCs, and embedded boards. It lets tools read PSS and IO subsystem registers to debug power management.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as narrow-purpose, because the code only matches two specific Atom SoC generations whose client parts are discontinued and whose embedded variants reached end-of-servicing in September 2023. Even so, the driver is still actively maintained: a real functional fix to PSS event register handling landed in December 2025, and a 2025 cleanup series only pruned dead code rather than proposing removal, so the hardware still in the field is being looked after.
repository signals
sources
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows CONFIG_INTEL_TELEMETRY is still present in current kernels and describes it as an Intel SoC telemetry driver for Apollo Lake onwards.
- intel.com
Representative Apollo Lake embedded SKU x5-E3940 is a Q4'16 product with embedded use conditions and 'End of Servicing Updates' dated September 30, 2023.
- intel.com
Representative Gemini Lake Refresh SKU J4125 is listed as discontinued, indicating the supported Goldmont Plus-era client hardware is no longer current.
- patch.msgid.link
The driver received a real functional fix in December 2025 for PSS event register mask handling, showing current upstream maintenance.
- spinics.net
A 2025 'Remove deadcode' cleanup series for intel_telemetry was applied upstream; this was code pruning, not a driver removal discussion.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver directory: Kconfig plus module/platform init code, and local source inspection shows x86 CPU matches only for INTEL_ATOM_GOLDMONT and GOLDMONT_PLUS (Apollo/Gemini-era SoCs). Upstream activity was checked via local `git log` shell output, which exposed the patch.msgid.link URL for a Dec 24, 2025 bug fix and showed no removal series; the Spinics URL was obtained by web search to confirm the June 2025 cleanup series was accepted and was dead-code removal only. Deployment looks legacy/embedded rather than broad: the Intel ARK pages were obtained by web search and show Apollo Lake embedded parts at EOSU in 2023 and representative Gemini Lake Refresh parts discontinued. Because the driver still sees substantive fixes on aging but still-deployed hardware, `keep-annotate` fits better than deprecate/remove.