Linux 5.12 To Move Ahead In Phasing Out Support For Outdated Intel MIDs

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 7 February 2021 at 01:24 PM EST. 2 Comments
INTEL
More than a decade ago Intel was very excited about MIDs as "Mobile Internet Devices" with their early Menlow and Moorestown platforms. Intel's MID plays ultimately were unsuccessful in the long-term and the MID functionality ultimately evolved into smartphones and tablets. In 2021, the Intel MID support is being gutted from the Linux kernel.

Last month I wrote about Linux preparing to remove Moorestown and Medfield support with the code no longer being maintained and no apparent major users left still running this roughly decade old hardware with new Linux distributions. What started out as just early spring cleaning on some of the code has evolved into clearing out more of the Intel "MID" platform support.


With the support of Intel, Linux 5.12 is set to remove more of the "MID outdated platforms" support.


A pull request on Friday ahead of this month's Linux 5.12 merge window clears out nearly three thousand lines of code. This includes dropping old Intel MID power button and thermal drivers, stripping out now unneeded code from the GMA500 Poulsbo driver, dropping GPIO code, removing an RTC driver, and other code removal in clearing out the Intel MID support.


Back at IDF 2007 when MIDs were talked up by Intel with Moorestown it was looking very promising and interesting at the time. But now in 2021 it's time for this code to be cleared out while Intel's open-source engineers remain very busy on tidying up Sapphire Rapids support and ironing out their Alder Lake, Gen12.5 graphics, and other next-gen platforms.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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