HiSilicon Kirin 620 and Kirin 960 Reset Controllers
Small reset-controller blocks inside HiSilicon's Hi6220 (Kirin 620, 2015) and Hi3660 (Kirin 960, 2016) mobile SoCs, which let the kernel toggle resets for on-chip peripherals. These chips powered the 96Boards HiKey and HiKey960 developer boards and a handful of mid-range Huawei phones from that era.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as legacy because the SoCs are now a decade old and see only janitorial maintenance upstream, yet the HiKey and HiKey960 dev boards are still listed for sale on 96Boards in 2025 and several in-tree device trees rely on these reset blocks. No other driver covers the same hardware, so removing it would break those niche boards for little gain.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Recent upstream touch exists in 2024, but it was a small janitorial change rather than feature work, indicating light maintenance rather than active expansion.
- 96boards.org
HiKey is a Kirin 620 / Hi6220 board and was still listed with 'Buy Now' links on a current 96Boards product page, showing the platform remains obtainable in niche dev-board channels.
- 96boards.org
HiKey960 is a Kirin 960 board and was still listed on a current 96Boards product page with purchase links, suggesting the covered SoC family is not fully extinct even if niche.
- en.wikipedia.org
Hi6220 (Kirin 620) dates to Q1 2015 and Hi3660 (Kirin 960) to Q4 2016, placing this driver on older mobile/dev-board silicon rather than current mainstream designs.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local tree inspection via rg shows this directory only serves Hi6220 and Hi3660 reset blocks used by in-tree HiSilicon DTS files. lore_activity on hi6220_reset.c found sparse 2024 activity (one janitorial patch plus stable backports) and no clear removal thread; a directory-level lore_file_timeline lookup returned no hits, likely an indexing/path blind spot rather than evidence of deletion. Web search found live 96Boards product pages for HiKey and HiKey960, so hardware is still obtainable new in 2025+, but the cited HiSilicon/Wikipedia release data shows the SoCs are 2015-2016 era parts with low modern deployment. No natural replacement driver covers the same reset-controller blocks, so removal/deprecation would risk niche boards for little gain; annotate as legacy/niche instead.