Pluto2 FPGA-based PCI DVB-T tuner cards
Support for a small family of PCI digital terrestrial television tuner cards built around the Pluto2 FPGA design, most notably the Satelco Easywatch Mobile DVB-T Receiver. These cards let early-2000s PCs receive over-the-air digital TV broadcasts in regions using the DVB-T standard.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as a niche legacy driver: the hardware is a long-discontinued PCI DVB-T card class with very few users left, yet the code still draws genuine upstream maintenance attention, including a 2026 linux-media patch fixing a potential buffer overflow. Outright removal would be premature, but the driver is a reasonable candidate to label as legacy in documentation so users know modern USB DVB-T sticks are the realistic path forward.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The driver still receives real upstream attention: a 2026 linux-media patch fixes a potential buffer overflow in pluto2.
- git.kernel.org
Upstream Kconfig says this driver supports PCI cards based on the Pluto2 FPGA, such as the Satelco Easywatch Mobile Terrestrial DVB-T Receiver.
- git.kernel.org
The kernel media PCI card list still documents pluto2 as a supported PCI TV card driver.
- cateee.net
LKDDb indexes CONFIG_DVB_PLUTO2 as a long-standing Linux kernel driver option for Pluto2 cards, reinforcing that this is a niche legacy hardware-specific driver.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Lore history first: `lore_file_timeline` on drivers/media/pci/pluto2/pluto2.c showed sparse long-term activity but a fresh 2026 bug-fix patch, which argues against deprecation/removal and supports `keep-annotate`. A follow-up removal-search attempt via `lore_regex` timed out and a `lei` subject query could not start in the sandbox, so I did not treat removal discussion as evidenced. Hardware/use-case grounding came from local source inspection (`exec_command` on Kconfig) plus canonical recall URLs for kernel.org card docs and LKDDb. Deployment is judged `low` and not `none`: this is a legacy PCI terrestrial-TV receiver class with very weak signs of modern demand, but current upstream bug fixing means outright removal would be premature. `hardware_still_sold_new_in_2025=false` is an inference from the legacy PCI DVB-T product class and lack of contemporary availability evidence, so confidence is moderate rather than high.