HiSilicon Kirin and HiSTB SoC PHY drivers
A collection of low-level PHY (physical-layer) drivers for HiSilicon system-on-chip families, including the Kirin 960/970 mobile processors (Hi3660/Hi3670) used in late-2010s Huawei phones and the HiKey960 developer board, plus HiSTB set-top-box chips and the older HIX5 line. They handle USB, PCIe, and similar serial links inside those SoCs.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting as niche legacy-leaning support. The hardware spans 2017-era Kirin phone SoCs, set-top-box chips, and the HiKey960 96Boards developer kit (still nominally sold but low volume). The code continues to see routine upstream maintenance touches and there is no sign of removal proposals, so it should stay; however, deployments are small and mostly tied to discontinued or hobbyist hardware, which is worth flagging for future review.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
This directory still receives upstream touch in the linux-phy workflow; at least one 2026 treewide maintenance series modified HiSilicon PHY files rather than the code being abandoned or removed.
- 96boards.org
HiKey960, a board based on the HiSilicon Kirin 960 (Hi3660), was still listed with active 'Buy Now' channels on a page crawled in 2026, indicating at least niche new-hardware availability beyond pure legacy used stock.
- hisilicon.com
Hi3660-class support in this directory maps to the Kirin 960 family.
- en.wikichip.org
Hi3670 maps to Kirin 970, a 2017-era mobile SoC family, which supports the conclusion that much of the covered hardware is old rather than current-volume mainstream silicon.
- cateee.net
The hi3660 USB PHY driver remains present in current kernel configuration indexes through modern kernel releases, with no sign of upstream removal.
- cateee.net
The hi3670 PCIe PHY driver also remains present in current kernel configuration indexes through modern kernel releases, again arguing against removal.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local `exec_command` inspection of drivers/phy/hisilicon/Kconfig and .c files shows seven real PHY drivers spanning hi6220/hi3660/hi3670/HiSTB/HIX5. Lore evidence came from `lore_activity` on exact files under linux-phy; it showed current-cycle maintenance touches but I found no removal evidence. Deployment evidence came from web search: 96Boards product page shows niche new HiKey960 availability, while Hi3670/Kirin 970 is clearly a 2017-era phone SoC. Conclusion: this is old, niche, mixed-family support with some remaining upstream attention, so keep it but annotate as low-deployment legacy-oriented support rather than deprecate/remove.