Conexant CX23885/87/88 PCIe TV tuner bridges
A family of Conexant PCIe bridge chips found on analog and digital TV tuner cards from the late 2000s onward, including popular Hauppauge WinTV models (HVR-1800, HVR-5525, WinTV-quadHD) and various AVerMedia and DViCO boards. The chips handle video capture, MPEG transport, and DVB demodulator interfacing for desktop PC TV cards.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting its niche. Although PC TV tuner cards are a shrinking market, Hauppauge still sells compatible boards like the WinTV-quadHD new in 2025, and the code is actively maintained with bug fixes, power-management work, and new board IDs landing as recently as 2024-2026. There is no replacement driver for these chips, so removing it would orphan hardware users can still buy today.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
As of March 20, 2026 the driver still receives bug-fix patches, including a cx23885 ioremap cleanup marked for stable.
- lore.kernel.org
As of March 17, 2026 the driver still receives functional updates, here adding a module option to disable analog video.
- lore.kernel.org
As of December 31, 2024 the driver still received power-management work, here a simple suspend/resume addition.
- lore.kernel.org
As of June 2, 2024 cx23885 still had board-enable work, here adding analog support for the AVerMedia H789-C PCIe card.
- hauppauge.com
Hauppauge still markets the WinTV-quadHD as a PCIe TV tuner product, showing at least one cx23885-supported board family remained sold new in the mid-2020s.
- hauppage.com
Hauppauge's webstore listed WinTV-quadHD for sale recently, supporting that compatible hardware was still available new in 2025/2026.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection (`rg`, `sed`) shows this is a real V4L/DVB PCIe bridge driver for Conexant 23885-family TV cards with many supported board IDs, including Hauppauge quadHD/HVR5525 and others. `lore_activity` on core/cards files found real 2024-2026 maintenance and feature traffic, and no concrete removal series surfaced; `lore_file_timeline` on the directory returned 0 hits, likely a path-coverage blind spot, while a `lore_regex` removal query timed out and `lei` was unusable under sandbox restrictions. Web `search_query` found Hauppauge product and store pages for WinTV-quadHD, so the hardware class is still sold new but appears niche; that supports `keep-annotate` rather than deprecate/remove, with low current deployments and no natural in-tree replacement driver for the same chips.