B2C2 FlexCop II/IIb/III DVB receiver core
Shared chipset support code for B2C2 FlexCop satellite, cable, and terrestrial digital TV tuner cards, sold in the 2000s under the TechniSat SkyStar, AirStar, CableStar, and Sky2PC brands as PCI cards and USB 1.1 boxes. The PCI and USB front-end drivers both build on top of this common core.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting as legacy. The hardware has not been sold new for over a decade — TechniSat's own support pages only list downloads from 2011 to 2013 — yet upstream developers were still fixing real bugs in the FlexCop EEPROM code as recently as July 2025, and there is no sign of a removal effort. That combination justifies leaving it in tree with a clear note that it targets long-obsolete DVB peripherals.
repository signals
sources
- cateee.net
The common b2c2 core is still present in current kernels and is the shared core for FlexCop hardware, selected by the PCI and USB drivers.
- cateee.net
Supported hardware is legacy TechniSat/B2C2 Air/Sky/CableStar2 PCI cards based on the FlexCop chip.
- cateee.net
Supported USB hardware is an older Air/Sky/Cable2PC USB 1.1 box, reinforcing that this family targets legacy DVB peripherals.
- spinics.net
There was real upstream fix traffic in July 2025 for flexcop-eeprom, including a corrected v2 patch that fixed a build/runtime issue rather than only treewide churn.
- spinics.net
The driver family also received another 2025 touch in linux-media, showing it is not under active removal.
- technisat.com
Vendor support material for a SkyStar USB product is centered on old downloads from 2011-2013, which is consistent with a long-legacy product line rather than current new-hardware sales.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local Kconfig read via shell shows this directory is the shared FlexCop core used only when the PCI or USB front-end drivers are enabled, so it is real driver code rather than a helper-only library. LKDDb URLs were obtained via web search and used to identify the chipset family and attached PCI/USB products. linux-media patch URLs were obtained via web search and show 2025 maintenance, including at least one substantive flexcop-eeprom fix, with no removal-series evidence found in the searched archives. The TechniSat support URL was obtained via web search/open; its old 2011-2013 download timestamps support treating the hardware as legacy. Net: hardware family is obsolete and likely only in residual hobbyist/industrial deployments, but upstream still fixes it occasionally, so keep the code with an explicit legacy annotation rather than deprecate/remove.