TI OMAP and DRA7/AM57 on-chip bandgap thermal sensors
On-die temperature sensors built into Texas Instruments OMAP3, OMAP4, OMAP5, and DRA7/AM57 application processors, used by Linux to monitor SoC temperature and trigger throttling. These chips powered smartphones and tablets in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and the DRA7/AM57 variants are still shipped today in industrial and automotive boards.
recommendation
Worth keeping but worth labelling as mostly legacy. Most of the supported parts (OMAP3/4/5) are long-obsolete, and the OMAP3 option already tells users to say no, but TI still actively sells AM5728-class DRA7 chips that rely on this code, and the driver received real fixes as recently as December 2024 with further patch traffic in 2026. A note clarifying that it primarily serves older OMAP devices plus a narrow band of current TI industrial SoCs would help packagers decide whether to enable it.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The driver still gets upstream fixes in 2026; this patch touches the ti bandgap path.
- lore.kernel.org
The driver received a substantive fix in December 2024, indicating ongoing maintenance rather than abandonment.
- ti.com
TI listed AM5728 parts as ACTIVE on a current product page, showing at least one DRA7/AM57-class deployment target remains sold new.
- e2e.ti.com
TI support discussion for AM5726/AM5728 explicitly references CONFIG_DRA752_THERMAL, connecting this driver family to still-used AM57/DRA7 systems.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver, not an internal helper. Local shell inspection of Kconfig/of_match showed support for OMAP34xx/36xx/4430/4460/4470/5430 and DRA752; OMAP3 help text already says 'Say N', so much of the matrix is legacy. lore_activity tool returned recent 2024 and 2026 fix traffic via the cited lore URLs, which argues against deprecation. A removal-subject lore regex/path scan timed out rather than finding a removal series. Web search found TI's AM5728 page marked ACTIVE and a TI E2E thread tying AM57x use to CONFIG_DRA752_THERMAL; that suggests the DRA7/AM57 end of this driver still appears in niche industrial/automotive deployments. Result: keep the driver, but annotate it as mostly legacy OMAP/DRA7-era hardware rather than broadly current silicon.