NVIDIA Tegra BPMP Reset Controller (Tegra186/194/234, Jetson Xavier and Orin)
Hardware reset control for modern NVIDIA Tegra systems-on-chip, including the Tegra186, Tegra194, and Tegra234 used in the Jetson Xavier and Jetson Orin developer kits and embedded modules. Rather than poking reset registers directly, it asks the SoC's onboard Boot and Power Management Processor (BPMP) firmware to assert and release resets on behalf of the main CPUs.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as niche, because the hardware is current and still sold: NVIDIA's product lifecycle pages list Jetson Xavier and Orin variants as available through 2028 to 2033. The code sees only sparse churn, but a substantive maintenance patch landed in mid-2024, showing it is still cared for rather than abandoned. A short note that this is a low-traffic but still-shipping embedded driver would help future triagers avoid mistaking quiet for dead.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
A non-mechanical upstream maintenance patch for this driver was posted in June 2024 and merged for July 2024, indicating the code is still maintained rather than under removal.
- git.zx2c4.com
The reset subsystem history includes the 2024-07-01 tegra-bpmp COMPILE_TEST change and shows normal subsystem maintenance activity, with no visible tegra-bpmp removal series in that log slice.
- cateee.net
CONFIG_RESET_TEGRA_BPMP remains present in current kernels and is tracked from Linux 4.10 through current 6.x/7.0-rc heads, showing ongoing upstream inclusion.
- developer.nvidia.com
NVIDIA lists Jetson AGX Orin, Orin NX, Orin Nano, Xavier NX, and AGX Xavier variants as available through 2028-2033, so BPMP-based Tegra hardware is still sold for new deployments in 2025.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver directory: one C file implements a reset_controller using Tegra BPMP MRQ_RESET. Local git history was obtained with exec_command (`git log`/`git show`), which produced the lore URL for the 2024 maintenance patch; that lore link was cited directly. The git.zx2c4 reset log URL and LKDDb/NVIDIA lifecycle pages were obtained via web search/open. Sparse churn suggests niche embedded usage, but current Jetson product-lifecycle data and a 2024 substantive touch argue against deprecation; annotate as niche/low-churn rather than remove.