drivers/pinctrl/vt8500 · keep-annotate

VIA VT8500 and WonderMedia WM8xxx ARM SoC pin controller

Configures pin muxing and GPIO routing on VIA's VT8500 family and the related WonderMedia WM8505/WM8650/WM8750/WM8850 ARM SoCs, which powered cheap Android tablets, netbooks, and thin clients roughly between 2009 and the early 2010s.

keep-annotate conf=0.81 deploy=low replacement=none subsystem=pinctrl category=bus-other

81%

recommendation

Worth keeping but flagging as legacy because the SoCs it supports are obsolete tablet and netbook-era parts (WonderMedia was folded into VIA back in 2016), yet upstream still does occasional API housekeeping on it, including GPIO callback updates as recently as 2025. There's no removal discussion in flight, so the maintenance burden is low and dropping it would needlessly break the few remaining hobbyist and embedded users still booting these boards.

repository signals

9 files

2,759 source lines

10 commits, 5y

+23 / −23 lines added / removed, 5y

4 authors, 5y

monthly commits · 2021-04-21 → 2026-04-21 · 10 total · active in 5/61 months

sources

lore.kernel.org
Upstream still touches this driver in 2025; recent work was API-maintenance for GPIO callbacks rather than removal.
lore.kernel.org
The vt8500 pinctrl code also saw 2023 helper-conversion work, indicating it is still being kept buildable.
cateee.net
LKDDb shows CONFIG_PINCTRL_VT8500 is still present in current kernel series, covering the via,vt8500-pinctrl binding.
en.wikipedia.org
WonderMedia was merged into VIA in 2016; the supported SoCs are old tablet/netbook-era parts rather than current production platforms.
linuxdevices.org
VT8500-class hardware was already a low-cost thin-client/embedded platform in 2009, consistent with legacy-only deployments today.

codex reasoning notes (technical)

Real driver directory: built-in platform pinctrl drivers for VIA/WonderMedia SoCs. Local shell `rg` showed SoC-specific compatibles and driver entrypoints. `lore_activity` on pinctrl-wmt.c returned 2023 and 2025 maintenance patches and no sampled removal discussion; URLs taken from lore tool output. Web search found LKDDb, WonderMedia Wikipedia, and LinuxDevices historical VT8500 coverage. Hardware appears long obsolete and not a 2025 new-design target, but upstream still performs occasional API upkeep, so `keep-annotate` fits better than deprecate/remove.