Cavium/Marvell LiquidIO OCTEON SmartNICs
A family of programmable 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet SmartNIC adapters built on Cavium's OCTEON processors (CN23xx and CN6xxx generations), originally launched by Cavium in the mid-2010s and continued under Marvell after the 2018 acquisition. They are used in data centers and telco environments to offload networking, security, and virtualization tasks from host CPUs.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting as legacy hardware. Marvell still listed LiquidIO II adapters on its product pages into 2026, the driver received functional fixes on netdev and stable backports in early 2026, and Marvell reported over a million units shipped, so there is a real installed base still being maintained. However, the line has been superseded by LiquidIO III, so the existing driver is mature legacy code rather than a growth area.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
As of 2026-04-20 the driver still receives netdev-targeted functional fixes, indicating active upstream maintenance rather than abandonment.
- lore.kernel.org
LiquidIO fixes were backported to stable in February 2026, showing the code is still considered relevant to supported deployed systems.
- marvell.com
Marvell still listed LiquidIO II CN23xx 10/25GbE Smart NIC adapters on its product site in 2026, supporting the view that at least part of this hardware family remained commercially available through 2025.
- marvell.com
Marvell stated in 2020 that the LiquidIO line had shipped over 1 million units and that LiquidIO III was the newer generation, implying a substantial installed base but an aging product family.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local `rg`/`sed` inspection identified a real PCI Ethernet driver (`lio_main.c`, `lio_vf_main.c`) for Cavium LiquidIO with CN23xx/CN6xxx/OCTEON firmware names. `lore_file_timeline` on `drivers/net/ethernet/cavium/liquidio/lio_main.c` showed recent 2026 netdev and stable activity; that argues against deprecation/removal now. A `lore_regex` removal-search timed out, and a web lore search found no clear removal/deprecation thread, so no escalation to `remove`. Web search found Marvell product pages still listing LiquidIO II Smart NICs in 2026, while Marvell's newsroom page shows a large installed base and that newer LiquidIO III succeeded it. Overall: aging hardware with continuing maintenance and ongoing deployments, so keep the driver but annotate it as legacy/aging rather than deprecate.