Linux To Drop Support For 15 Year Old, Never-Shipped Intel "Carillo Ranch"

With Intel's very timely upstream Linux hardware support going back years, they typically start on the upstream hardware enablement well in advance of the product's planned public launch. On a number of occasions this has meant adding support to the Linux kernel for hardware that never ends up being released to consumers. There's been recent cases like the Thunder Bay support that was dropped from the kernel after it became clear that the SoC would never ship to now a more extreme case of a driver being in the mainline kernel for 15 years to support never-released hardware.

Two patches have been posted for clearing out a little more than 2k lines of driver code for supporting the Intel "Carillo Ranch" hardware. This was for the Intel EP80579 integrated processor from 2007~2008: a 90nm 32-bit single-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz with a 19 Watt TDP and intended for embedded devices.

Back in 2007, Intel funded Tungsten Graphics -- the firm that at the time drove Mesa development before being acquired by VMware -- to develop a frame-buffer (FBDEV) driver for Carillo Ranch. There's also an MTD Carillo Ranch driver that Intel funded MontaVista to work on back in 2006.

"As far as anybody can tell, this product never shipped. If it did, it shipped in 2007 and nobody has access to one any more."

But Linux kernel developers now in 2023 have deemed that the drivers are unused as the hardware apparently never shipped. So a decade and a half later, they are set for removal from the mainline Linux kernel. If by chance there is any Intel Carillo Ranch processors in some niche random hardware on eBay or the like, chances are no one is going to be running a mainline Linux kernel on this 1.2GHz single-core 32-bit processor in 2024+.

So with these patches presumably to be merged for Linux 6.8, the Intel Carillo Ranch support is being removed. It's a bit surprising this code didn't hit the chopping block years ago.