Airoha EN7581 and AN7583 SoC Ethernet controllers
Onboard Ethernet MAC and packet-offload engine built into Airoha's EN7581 and AN7583 system-on-chip parts, which power 10G-PON broadband gateways and Wi-Fi routers shipped to ISPs and consumers from 2024 onward. It handles the chip's frame engine, QDMA, and packet-processing pipeline so the SoC can move traffic at line rate without burning CPU.
recommendation
It should stay because this is a new and actively maintained driver for current Airoha broadband silicon, with upstream feature work landing as recently as mid-2025 and OpenWrt shipping a dedicated Airoha target. The hardware is still being sold for residential and enterprise gateways in 2025, and no other in-tree driver covers this chip family.
repository signals
sources
- lore-kernel.gnuweeb.org
As of March 2026 the driver was still receiving net-next fixes and at least one Airoha patch was applied upstream, indicating active maintenance rather than removal.
- lore-kernel.gnuweeb.org
In July 2025 the driver was part of a 7-patch net-next series adding NPU callbacks for WLAN offload, showing feature development after initial merge.
- lwn.net
The EN7581 ethernet support was introduced upstream in 2024 for Airoha EN7581 SoC hardware, confirming this is a very new driver family rather than legacy baggage.
- airoha.com
Airoha markets the AN7581 series as a 10G-PON SoC for residential and enterprise gateways with OpenWrt/Linux support, so the underlying hardware family was still an actively sold platform in 2025.
- downloads.openwrt.org
OpenWrt still ships a dedicated Airoha target with an AN7581 subtarget in 2026 snapshots, which is strong evidence of current downstream deployment and enablement activity.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local `rg` via shell showed OF compatibles `airoha,en7581-eth` and `airoha,an7583-eth`, so this is a current platform Ethernet driver for new Airoha broadband SoCs, not a legacy NIC. Lore evidence was gathered via `web.search_query`: a March 2026 applied net-next patch and a July 2025 feature series both show active upstream work; no removal/deprecation thread surfaced in the same lore searches. Deployment evidence came from `web.search_query` results on Airoha product pages and OpenWrt snapshot targets: hardware appears to be current operator/CPE silicon, but in a niche embedded broadband market, so deployments are best rated low rather than medium/high. No natural upstream replacement driver exists because this covers a specific Airoha FE/QDMA/PPE block.