Microchip PolarFire SoC system controller support
Platform glue for the system controller blocks on Microchip's PolarFire SoC, a RISC-V plus FPGA chip family launched around 2020 and still being sold in 2025 on boards like the Icicle Kit. It mediates communication between Linux and the on-chip service controller that handles things like secure boot, firmware services, and system-level housekeeping.
recommendation
It should stay because the PolarFire SoC family is still actively sold by Microchip in 2025, including the Icicle developer kit built around production MPFS250T silicon, and the code is still receiving upstream fixes as recently as early 2026. There is no deprecation signal here — this is current platform support for hardware shipping today.
repository signals
sources
- lists.infradead.org
Public patch thread for a 2026 fix to mpfs_sys_controller_probe() shows the driver is still receiving upstream maintenance rather than removal.
- microchip.com
Microchip still markets the PolarFire SoC FPGA family as a current Linux-capable product family.
- microchip.com
Microchip still sells a current PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit based on production MPFS250T silicon, indicating ongoing new deployments and developer availability.
- ww1.microchip.com
A 2025 QuickStart guide documents booting Linux on the PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit, supporting present-day Linux deployment relevance.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
In-tree inspection via shell (`sed`) shows three platform drivers in this directory, all for MPFS system-controller/syscon blocks, so this is active SoC support code rather than a helper library. Local shell `git -c safe.directory=... log -- drivers/soc/microchip` shows substantive fixes and feature work from 2022 through 2026-03, with no removal/deprecation commits; a grep over commit messages found only maintenance wording around `.remove` callbacks, not removal plans. URLs were obtained by web search: the lists.infradead patch thread was found by searching a recent commit hash/subject after lore search returned no results, and the Microchip product/kit pages plus 2025 QuickStart PDF were found by web search on PolarFire SoC family and Icicle Kit. Because the hardware family is still sold and the directory has recent upstream fixes, there is no deprecation signal; keep it.