HiSilicon Kirin 620 / Hi6220 display controller (HiKey)
Drives the on-chip display pipeline (the ADE display engine and MIPI DSI output) of HiSilicon's Kirin 620 / Hi6220 mobile SoC. In practice that means the original 96Boards HiKey single-board computer from around 2015, which is still listed for sale and uses this code to push pixels to its HDMI/DSI outputs.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting its niche, because the only mainstream board it serves is the 96Boards HiKey reference platform built on the Kirin 620 / Hi6220 SoC. The code was still receiving upstream cleanup patches as recently as November 2025, so it isn't abandoned, but its real-world user base is small and tied to a single ageing developer board.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The driver was still receiving upstream maintenance in late 2025, including a kirin-specific DRM cleanup patch.
- cateee.net
LKDDb ties CONFIG_DRM_HISI_KIRIN to HiSilicon hi6220-compatible hardware and shows the driver remains present through current kernel series.
- 96boards.org
The HiKey board product page identifies the supported hardware as Kirin 620/Hi6220 and still advertised new-board purchase availability on a page crawled in 2026.
- 96boards.org
The HiKey hardware manual states the board is based on the HiSilicon Kirin 620 (Hi6220) SoC and exposes display outputs relevant to this DRM driver.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local source inspection via `rg` in the tree showed DT compatibles `hisilicon,hi6220-ade` and `hisilicon,hi6220-dsi`, so this directory is specifically the Hi6220/Kirin 620 display driver. Lore evidence came from `lore_file_timeline` on `kirin_drm_drv.c`; it showed real 2025 maintenance rather than abandonment. Web search produced the 96Boards HiKey product/manual URLs and LKDDb page. I found no concrete removal-series evidence in the allotted budget; given ongoing upstream fixes but very niche, old board support, this fits `keep-annotate` rather than deprecate/remove.