A single-chip PCI Express gigabit Ethernet controller family (the ET1310 / ET131x) originally designed by Agere Systems in the mid-2000s and later inherited by LSI after the 2007 merger. It appeared on a modest number of add-in NICs and embedded boards and has had no new silicon developed since.
Worth keeping but documenting its niche because the hardware comes from Agere Systems, which was absorbed into LSI in 2007, and the chip is no longer sold new. Despite that, the code still picks up small fixes through stable backports as recently as August 2025, and there is no replacement driver for these specific PCI IDs, so removing it would strand the remaining users without offering any obvious benefit.
repository signals
4files
5,533source lines
14commits, 5y
+67 / −26lines added / removed, 5y
12authors, 5y
monthly commits · 2021-04-21 → 2026-04-21 · 14 total · active in 13/61 months
The in-tree driver covers Agere/LSI ET-131x PCIe Ethernet controllers (PCI IDs 11c1:ed00 and 11c1:ed01) and remains present in current kernel releases.
Agere Systems ceased to exist as an independent vendor in 2007 after merging into LSI, consistent with this being legacy hardware rather than a current product line.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Legacy single-chip PCIe GbE NIC family from a defunct vendor, with low likely deployment today and no obvious successor driver because support is specific to this controller family. I used `mcp__lore_http__.lore_file_timeline` on `drivers/net/ethernet/agere/et131x.c` to verify recent activity and took the cited lore URL from that result; I used web search to obtain the LKDDb device/support page and the Agere Systems Wikipedia page. A subject-regex lore query for removal talk timed out, so I found no positive evidence of an active removal campaign; given 2025 stable traffic, `keep-annotate` fits better than deprecate/remove.