IBM Remote Supervisor Adapter (RSA) service processor
A PCI add-in service-processor card that IBM shipped in its eServer xSeries servers (such as the xSeries 205, 220, 235, 255, 330, 345, and 346) in the early-to-late 2000s. It provided out-of-band management — remote power control, console redirection, and hardware health monitoring — predating the integrated BMC/IPMI controllers found on modern servers.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting its niche: the hardware was last broadly current around 2009 and is rare in production today, but the code still receives real bug fixes (a bounds-check patch landed in 2026) and no one has proposed removing it. Because there is no in-tree successor that covers this specific PCI RSA card, the small population of admins still running legacy IBM xSeries boxes would lose management capability if it were dropped.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Upstream still sees real maintenance: a targeted ibmasm bounds-check fix was posted in 2026, indicating the driver is not abandoned even if hardware is old.
- cateee.net
LKDDb identifies CONFIG_IBM_ASM as the driver for PCI vendor 1014 device 010f, IBM Remote Supervisor Adapter (RSA), and shows it remains present in current kernel series.
- ibm.com
IBM describes the hardware as a PCI Remote Supervisor Adapter for IBM eServer xSeries platforms such as xSeries 205/220/235/255/330/345, tying the driver to legacy early-2000s server lines.
- ibm.com
Vendor-visible RSA II firmware/update material is tied to IBM eServer xSeries 346 and shows a 2009 release, supporting the conclusion that the hardware family was last broadly current in the late 2000s.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Keep-annotate: the code targets IBM RSA/ASM service-processor hardware for legacy xSeries servers, which is not a new-deployment class in 2025, but lore_file_timeline showed a real 2026 bug-fix patch rather than only treewide churn, and no removal discussion was found. URLs were obtained via lore_file_timeline (lore.kernel.org link) and web search (LKDDb and IBM support pages). No clear in-tree successor covers the same PCI RSA card, so replacement_driver is null; modern servers generally use different integrated BMC/IPMI paths instead of this device.