ST-Ericsson Ux500 / NovaThor U8500 SoC identification helper
A small support file for ST-Ericsson's Ux500 / DBx500 chips, the NovaThor U8500-era smartphone and tablet SoCs that powered devices like the 2012 Samsung Galaxy S III mini. It exposes the SoC's identity (revision, family) to userspace rather than driving any specific peripheral.
recommendation
A candidate for future removal because the underlying hardware is a defunct smartphone platform: ST-Ericsson dissolved around 2012-2013 and no NovaThor parts have shipped new in over a decade. The directory has seen almost no upstream activity since 2020 (one substantive change in late 2022) and there is no current maintenance discussion on the lists. It is kept on life support mainly by hobbyist projects like postmarketOS running mainline Linux on aging Galaxy S III mini handsets, so deprecation rather than immediate removal is the proportionate call.
repository signals
sources
- git.kernel.org
The code is a small SoC-identification/sysfs helper for ST-Ericsson DBx500/Ux500 parts, registering soc_device data rather than driving a replaceable peripheral.
- cateee.net
CONFIG_UX500_SOC_ID is still present in current kernels, but LKDDb shows no bound hardware table and describes it as a SoC bus/sysfs information feature for ST-Ericsson ux500.
- en.wikipedia.org
NovaThor U8500 was a smartphone/tablet SoC family from the ST-Ericsson era, with the product line effectively historical by the 2012-2013 breakup timeframe rather than a current commercial platform.
- wiki.postmarketos.org
There is still niche community use on old NovaThor U8500 phones: postmarketOS lists a 2012 Galaxy S III mini as mainline-capable/testing, indicating hobbyist legacy deployments rather than new sales.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local inspection via shell showed one file, ux500-soc-id.c, using subsys_initcall to expose SoC identity for DB8500/8520/5500/9540. Shell git log on that file showed only one substantive non-treewide touch since 2020 (2022-11-08), indicating very low upstream attention. Attempted lore access via shell `lei q`, but `lei` was unavailable; follow-up web searches scoped to lore.kernel.org returned no hits for this directory/file, so I found no evidence of active removal or maintenance discussion. Source URLs were obtained as follows: kernel.org tree URL by canonical recall for the inspected file; LKDDb, Wikipedia, and postmarketOS via web search. Net: obsolete handset SoC family, not sold new in 2025, but still has low-level legacy/community deployments, so deprecate rather than remove.