USB PHY and OTG transceiver drivers for embedded SoCs
Drivers for the analog front-end chips and on-SoC blocks that handle physical USB signaling on embedded boards, covering parts like the NXP ISP1301, generic ULPI transceivers, and built-in PHYs on TI AM335x/OMAP, NVIDIA Tegra, and Freescale i.MX/MXS. They sit between the USB controller and the connector, handling signaling and OTG role switching on industrial boards and older mobile-class SoCs.
recommendation
Worth keeping but worth flagging as a mixed bag. The directory is still actively maintained, with patches landing in late 2025 and January 2026 for the Tegra HSIC PHY and the generic USB PHY API, and hardware it serves (notably TI AM335x, still sold by Phytec and supported by TI's 2025 SDK) remains in production. However, individual leaf drivers are aging: a Marvell OTG option was recently pruned and the Freescale USB PHY was marked orphaned in 2024, so it should be periodically audited for dead sub-drivers rather than removed wholesale.
repository signals
sources
- spinics.net
Active upstream development continued in late 2025 with a Tegra USB PHY HSIC support series touching drivers/usb/phy/phy-tegra-usb.c.
- spinics.net
Active maintenance continued in January 2026 with generic usb-phy API cleanup in drivers/usb/phy/phy-generic.c.
- spinics.net
Recent cleanup removed an orphaned Marvell OTG-related option from drivers/usb/phy/Kconfig, indicating selective pruning of dead sub-pieces rather than whole-directory retirement.
- spinics.net
Linux-usb thread index shows a 2024 patch marking Freescale USB PHY as orphaned, supporting the view that some leaf drivers are legacy/orphaned inside an otherwise still-used directory.
- ti.com
TI published AM335x Linux SDK releases in 2025 and lists supported AM335x products/hardware, indicating ongoing real-world use of hardware covered by this directory.
- phytec.com
A commercial AM335x system-on-module/development kit remained offered for sale, showing at least one family served by this directory is still sold new.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Obtained local context from shell (`rg`, `sed`) and local git log (`git -c safe.directory=... log`) showing multiple substantive 2025-2026 touches across phy-generic, tegra, fsl, mxs, isp1301. Lore-equivalent evidence was gathered via web search because `lei` was unavailable: spinics thread pages show active patch traffic in Dec 2025 and Jan 2026, plus selective cleanup/orphaning of specific legacy entries. Conclusion: this is not a removal candidate at directory level; annotate that it is a mixed legacy/active bucket, with some old SoC-specific drivers likely low-deployment while AM335x-class industrial hardware still appears current.