SoC and virtual-platform power-off and reset controllers
A grab-bag of small drivers that perform the final reboot or power-off step on many platforms: ARM and RISC-V SoCs, vendor PMICs, embedded boards, and virtual machines such as QEMU's Arm virt. They are the code that actually cuts power or triggers a reset when Linux shuts down, spanning hardware from older embedded boards up to 2025 silicon like Apple Silicon Macs and T-Head TH1520.
recommendation
It should stay because this is a living, multi-vendor collection of small drivers that handle reboot and power-off on dozens of SoCs and virtual machines, with new entries still landing for boards like Apple Silicon (MACSMC), T-Head TH1520, SpacemiT P1, and the QEMU Arm virt machine. Upstream activity is healthy — over 130 substantive commits from 54 authors in the last five years, including 2024 stable backports for the Broadcom STB reboot driver — and there is no single replacement, since each entry serves a different platform.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
At least one driver in this directory, brcmstb-reboot, received a functional fix in 2024 that was carried into stable trees, indicating ongoing upstream maintenance rather than abandonment.
- qemu.org
QEMU documents the current virt-ctrl device as supporting power-control commands including reset and halt, matching the in-tree qemu-virt-ctrl driver and showing a live virtualization deployment niche.
- qemu.org
QEMU's current Arm virt machine documentation describes the virt platform as the recommended board type for Linux guests and includes reset/poweroff related virtual devices, supporting continued new deployments in VMs.
- git.kernel.org
The directory's Kconfig still carries a broad set of enabled targets, including recent platform entries such as MACSMC, TH1520_AON, SPACEMIT_P1, and QEMU_VIRT_CTRL, showing the directory is a living multi-platform subsystem rather than a single obsolete driver.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Not a removal candidate: static metadata already shows 131 substantive commits in 5 years, 54 authors, and a latest substantive touch on 2026-01-30. I obtained the stable patch URL via `lore_file_timeline` on `drivers/power/reset/brcmstb-reboot.c`; it showed 2024 stable backports and no removal thread. I checked for removal/deprecation talk with `lore_regex` over prose in the last 5 years and got no hits. I used local shell inspection of `drivers/power/reset/Kconfig` to confirm the directory spans many still-relevant SoC and VM reset/poweroff drivers; the kernel.org Kconfig URL is a canonical recall citation for that file. I obtained the QEMU URLs via web search; they show current virtual platforms and virt-ctrl power control, which means at least part of this directory serves ongoing new deployments. Because this directory is heterogeneous and actively maintained, there is no single upstream replacement driver.