NXP/Philips SJA1000 stand-alone CAN controllers
A long-running family of stand-alone Controller Area Network (CAN) bus controllers originally designed by Philips and now sold by NXP, used on PCI, PC/104, and embedded carrier boards to give industrial PCs, automotive test rigs, and machine-control systems a CAN 2.0A/B interface. It is the workhorse chip behind many SocketCAN deployments and is still designed into new hardware in the 2020s.
recommendation
It should stay in the kernel because the SJA1000 remains a current, orderable part from NXP and continues to ship on widely used industrial CAN interface boards such as PEAK-System's PCAN-PCI and embeddedTS's TS-CAN1. Upstream activity is healthy, with dozens of substantive commits in recent years and patches still landing on linux-can in 2026. Newer CAN controllers like M_CAN are different silicon and would not cover the installed base.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Upstream work is still active in 2026; this file received a functional net-next patch changing SJA1000 error-state handling.
- nxp.com
NXP still listed the SJA1000T product as Active, indicating the controller family was still an orderable/current product in 2025-2026.
- peak-system.com
PEAK-System still marketed PCAN-PCI hardware using the NXP SJA1000 controller, showing ongoing real hardware deployments around this driver family.
- docs.embeddedts.com
embeddedTS still documented the TS-CAN1 board and its use of the SJA1000 with Linux SocketCAN, supporting present-day embedded/industrial deployment evidence.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Recommendation is keep: static history already shows 55 substantive commits in 5y, and lore_activity on drivers/net/can/sja1000/sja1000.c returned 2026 linux-can/netdev patches, so this is maintained rather than abandoned. Web search found NXP's official product page marking SJA1000T Active, plus current vendor pages/manuals for PEAK PCAN-PCI and embeddedTS TS-CAN1 using SJA1000, so hardware is still sold for industrial/embedded niches. No natural in-tree replacement covers the same installed hardware base; newer CAN controllers such as m_can are different silicon, not drop-in replacements. URL provenance: lore URL from mcp__lore_http__.lore_activity; vendor URLs from web.search_query results.