Linux Says Farewell To Intel's Smartphone Attempts With Clearing Out Moorestown / Medfield

Not only are some old ARM platforms and some obsolete, obscure CPU architectures on the chopping block for some spring cleaning in the Linux kernel, but the Intel Moorestown and Medfield "Mobile Internet Device" platforms are being phased out from the Linux kernel this spring as well.

Moorestown was Intel's early Atom platform geared for handheld mobile Internet devices and smartphones.

Intel's former Moblin Linux

This was back during the days Intel was working on Moblin Linux (later, MeeGo) and had much hope for competing in the mobile space...

Talk of Moorestown happened back during the good old days of IDF...

Medfield followed Moorestown but with the Intel smartphone ambitions never coming to fruition, the Linux support code has been left to rot with not seeing any real activity in years.

Last year saw Linux work to drop the buggy Poulsbo/Moorestown 2D acceleration code as well as obsoleting Intel's short-lived Simple Firmware Interface. Now with Linux 5.12, more deprecated Moorestown/Medfield code is on the chopping block.

The Intel MID drivers like intel_mid_powerbtn and intel_mid_thermal are being removed from the mainline kernel with the basis:

Intel Moorestown and Medfield are quite old Intel Atom based 32-bit platforms, which were in limited use in some Android phones, tablets and consumer electronics more than eight years ago.

There are no bugs or problems ever reported outside from Intel for breaking any of that platforms for years. It seems no real users exists who run a more or less fresh kernel on it. Commit 05f4434bc130 ("ASoC: Intel: remove mfld_machine") which has been upstream for a while now confirms this theory.

Due to above and to reduce a burden of supporting outdated drivers we remove the support of outdated platforms completely.

That commit referenced was the dropping of the Medfield machine driver back in 2018 after already at that time some code mistakes led to the driver not even getting compiled. Thus with no one complaining in three years of brokenness, it's just time to flush out the rest of the Moorestown and Medfield drivers and forget of Intel's smartphone/MID attempts.

This latest batch of Intel code removal is set to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 5.12 cycle.