ASPEED and Nuvoton BMC PECI controllers
PECI (Platform Environment Control Interface) host controllers built into the baseboard management controller chips that sit on most modern server motherboards, specifically ASPEED's AST24xx/25xx/26xx family and Nuvoton's NPCM7xx/NPCM8xx family. They give the BMC a sideband channel to query Intel CPUs for temperatures, errors, and other telemetry used by remote management and fan control.
recommendation
It should stay in the kernel because the underlying hardware, the baseboard management controllers on ASPEED AST2600-class and Nuvoton NPCM7xx/NPCM8xx silicon, is still being designed into new servers in 2025. Upstream activity is current (a maintenance update landed in August 2025), Nuvoton announced OCP certification for the NPCM8mnx in July 2025, and there is no generic substitute since PECI bus access is SoC-specific.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Latest substantive upstream activity in 2025 was a functional maintenance update for peci-aspeed, showing the driver is still receiving attention.
- lore.kernel.org
The ASPEED PECI controller driver was added upstream for AST24xx/AST25xx/AST26xx BMC SoCs used with Intel platforms.
- lore.kernel.org
The Nuvoton NPCM PECI controller driver was added upstream for NPCM7xx/NPCM8xx BMC SoCs, expanding rather than shrinking supported hardware.
- aspeedtech.com
ASPEED still markets AST2600/AST2620 BMC products on its current server-management product page, indicating the family remains commercially relevant.
- nuvoton.com
Nuvoton announced OCP S.A.F.E. certification for NPCM8mnx in July 2025 and described the chip as available for customer sampling/evaluation, indicating ongoing new deployments.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver directory: contains PECI platform-controller drivers with module integration. No evidence of active removal/deprecation surfaced in local history; recent upstream touch was August 10, 2025. Lore URLs were obtained from local `git log` Link tags via shell; vendor URLs were obtained via web search. Hardware is current BMC silicon for server platforms, so this is not legacy-only. There is no natural upstream replacement driver because support is SoC-specific; recommendation is to keep.