Maxim/Dallas 1-Wire slave device drivers
Drivers for 1-Wire slave chips — small Maxim/Dallas (now Analog Devices) sensors, EEPROMs, and bridge ICs that talk to a host over a single data line. The family includes the popular DS18B20 temperature sensor, DS2433/DS28EC20 EEPROMs, and the DS28E17 1-Wire-to-I²C bridge, widely used in industrial monitoring, embedded boards, and hobbyist projects.
recommendation
Worth keeping but its niche should be documented: the underlying chips (DS18B20, DS28E17, DS28EC20) are still in active production at Analog Devices in 2025, and the directory itself saw real maintenance activity in 2023–2025, including a w1_therm bug fix and new DS28EC20 EEPROM support. Real-world deployments are now mostly industrial, embedded, and hobbyist rather than mainstream, so the code is healthy but firmly in specialist territory.
repository signals
sources
- spinics.net
w1_therm received a real bug-fix patch in November 2025, indicating current upstream maintenance rather than abandonment.
- spinics.net
w1_ds28e17 also saw a 2025 cleanup/modernization patch, showing ongoing maintainer attention in this directory.
- spinics.net
The directory gained new hardware support in late 2023 via DS28EC20 EEPROM support in the ds2433 driver, evidence of continuing functional relevance.
- docs.kernel.org
Current kernel documentation still publishes multiple drivers from drivers/w1/slaves, so the subsystem remains live and user-facing upstream.
- docs.kernel.org
w1_therm supports several 1-Wire temperature sensors, including DS18B20-class devices, tying the directory to still-used sensor hardware.
- analog.com
DS18B20 is listed as PRODUCTION by Analog Devices, so at least part of this driver family is still sold new.
- analog.com
DS28E17 is listed as PRODUCTION, showing that newer bridge devices covered by this directory are still commercially available.
- analog.com
DS28EC20 is listed as RECOMMENDED FOR NEW DESIGNS/PRODUCTION and is backward-compatible with DS2433, supporting continued relevance of the EEPROM side of this directory.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Not an early-exit case: this is a real driver directory with multiple slave drivers. File list and Makefile were obtained via shell (`rg --files`, `sed`). Upstream activity evidence came from targeted web searches that surfaced recent spinics patch threads for w1_therm, w1_ds28e17, and ds2433/DS28EC20 support. Deployment/sales evidence came from web search hits on current kernel docs and Analog Devices product pages. No modern removal/deprecation thread surfaced in the targeted searches; combined with recent fixes, that argues against deprecate/remove. Recommendation is keep-annotate because hardware is still sold, but overall 1-Wire slave deployments today are niche and mostly industrial/embedded/hobbyist rather than broad new-platform default use.