ENE CB710/720 laptop flash memory card readers
A PCI-attached multi-format memory card reader chip from ENE Technology that built MMC, SD, Memory Stick, and SmartMedia slots into laptops of the mid-2000s, such as the HP Compaq nx9500 era. It served as the bridge between the PCI bus and the small card slots on the side of those notebooks.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting as a legacy laptop driver, because the hardware is roughly 20 years old and not sold new, yet upstream developers were still posting real fixes through 2025 (a probe-path bug fix in October, a deprecated-PCI-function cleanup, and error-handling improvements). That ongoing maintenance suggests some users still rely on it, so removal would be premature even though deployment is clearly low.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Recent upstream attention exists: a cb710 probe-path bug fix was posted on 2025-10-29.
- lore.kernel.org
Recent upstream attention exists: cb710 was updated in 2025 to replace deprecated PCI functions.
- lore.kernel.org
Recent upstream attention exists: cb710 error-handling fixes were posted in 2025.
- cateee.net
LKDDb identifies this as CONFIG_CB710_CORE for ENE CB710/720 PCI flash-memory-card readers, device 1524:0510, still present in current kernel series.
- support.hp.com
Vendor support pages tie the hardware family to old laptop-era platforms such as the HP Compaq nx9500.
- macdat.net
A third-party hardware catalog lists the HP Compaq nx9500 as a 2004-era laptop with an SD/MMC/MS/SM card reader, consistent with legacy deployment only.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection of Kconfig/core.c shows a real PCI driver for ENE CB710/720 card-reader hardware used in some laptops and exposing MMC/MS/SM slots. lore_file_timeline on drivers/misc/cb710/core.c showed multiple non-removal fixes in 2025 (URLs above), so despite old hardware this is not fully dead upstream; that pushes the recommendation from deprecate toward keep-annotate. Web search found LKDDb for supported PCI ID/current kernel presence and HP/macdat pages showing association with an old nx9500-era laptop platform. I could not obtain strong removal-thread evidence: two lore_regex subject searches timed out and `lei` was blocked by the local sandbox.