Actions Semi Owl SPS power domains (S500/S700/S900)
Controls the on-chip power domains (the Smart Power System block) on Actions Semiconductor's Owl-family ARM SoCs — the S500, S700, and S900 — used in a handful of community single-board computers from around 2016 onward, most visibly the 96Boards Bubblegum-96. It gates power to subsystems like GPU and video blocks so the rest of the SoC support code can bring them up and idle them.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as niche. The hardware powers a small family of Actions Semiconductor Owl-series ARM boards (notably the 96Boards Bubblegum-96) that still see limited new sales but have very low overall deployment. Upstream activity is minimal — only a handful of touches, the latest a routine 2023 cleanup — and vendor involvement has always been thin, so a note documenting its narrow scope would help future maintainers weigh its cost.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The most recent substantive upstream touch to this driver was a 2023 cleanup patch updating owl-sps.c to use device_get_match_data().
- cateee.net
CONFIG_OWL_PM_DOMAINS covers Actions Semi SPS power domains for actions,s500-sps, actions,s700-sps, and actions,s900-sps, and remains present in current kernel series.
- 96boards.org
A current 96Boards product page still lists Bubblegum-96, based on the Actions S900 SoC, with a Buy link; this suggests at least niche new-hardware availability beyond initial launch.
- 96boards.org
96Boards described Bubblegum96 mainlining as community-driven and noted limited vendor support with a legacy 3.10 vendor kernel, indicating niche rather than broad ongoing deployment.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local source inspection via shell showed this is a real genpd driver with postcore_initcall and OF matches for Actions SPS blocks on S500/S700/S900. `git -c safe.directory=... log` showed only three touches in-tree for this path, with the latest 2023 patch linking to the cited lore URL; I also used a grep over git subjects and found no obvious removal-series signal. Web search found the LKDDb page confirming current kernel presence, the live 96Boards Bubblegum-96 product page indicating niche continued sale, and the 96Boards 2018 mainlining post showing limited vendor backing. Overall this looks low-volume but still relevant for a small existing board family, with no natural replacement beyond keeping the board-specific driver maintained and annotated as niche.