Comedi industrial data acquisition boards
A framework and large collection of drivers for industrial data-acquisition hardware: analog and digital I/O cards, counter/timer boards, and similar measurement devices from vendors like Measurement Computing, National Instruments, and Advantech. The supported lineup leans heavily on older ISA, PC/104, PCI, and parallel-port boards used in labs and factory automation since the 1990s.
recommendation
Worth keeping but worth flagging as a niche legacy subsystem. Patches are still flowing upstream as recently as 2026 and fixes are being backported into stable kernels, so it is actively maintained rather than abandoned, but the bulk of supported hardware is older ISA, PC/104, and parallel-port DAQ boards used in industrial and laboratory settings. Distros should continue shipping it for the scientific and factory-automation users who depend on it, while recognising it is not a mainstream consumer platform.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Comedi still receives upstream fixes in 2026; this patch updates the in-tree comedi_test driver.
- lore.kernel.org
Comedi fixes are still being queued/backported into stable trees in 2026.
- git.kernel.org
The subsystem covers a wide range of DAQ devices, including many ISA, PC/104, parallel-port, and test/misc drivers, which indicates a broad but largely legacy industrial I/O niche rather than a modern mainstream platform.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local inspection with `rg --files` and `sed` showed `drivers/comedi` is a real driver subsystem with core code plus many hardware drivers, but much of the menu is legacy ISA/PC104/parallel-port hardware. `lore_regex` produced Apr 2026 patch traffic and a stable backport URL, so upstream attention is clearly ongoing. A follow-up lore subject regex for removal/deprecation timed out, and `lei q` was blocked by the local sandbox socket permission error, so no confirmed removal thread was found. Kernel.org Kconfig URL is canonical recall; lore URLs were obtained from the `lore_regex` tool. Overall: keep it, but annotate as low-volume legacy/industrial hardware with continuing maintenance rather than a removal candidate.