DEC Tulip 21x4x PCI and CardBus Fast Ethernet adapters
A family of 10/100 Mbps PCI and CardBus Ethernet cards built around Digital Equipment Corporation's 21140, 21142, and 21143 "Tulip" chips and dozens of compatible clones from other vendors. These were extremely common in workstations, servers, and laptops through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s before Intel acquired the line and eventually discontinued it.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting as legacy hardware. The chips have not been sold or supported by Intel for many years, so real-world use is limited to surviving vintage machines and a few legacy virtualization products like Microsoft Virtual PC and early Hyper-V that emulated the 21140. However, the code is still receiving genuine upstream attention in 2025 — including a PCI devres API conversion and treewide networking fixes — so removing it now would be premature.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The driver still receives upstream maintenance in 2025; this netdev patch updates tulip to use the PCI devres API and was reviewed.
- lore.kernel.org
The directory was touched again in 2025 by a treewide net fix, showing the code is not abandoned in-tree.
- cateee.net
CONFIG_TULIP still exists in current kernels and covers DECchip 21140/21142/21143 plus many 21x4x-compatible PCI/CardBus Fast Ethernet boards.
- community.intel.com
Intel states the 21140 Ethernet controller is discontinued and no longer supported; the same thread notes use in legacy VM products such as Microsoft Virtual PC and Hyper-V.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver directory confirmed from local source scan (`rg`): module entry points and PCI IDs for DEC 21140/21142/21143 and compatibles. `lore_activity` on `drivers/net/ethernet/dec/tulip/tulip_core.c` showed recent 2025 netdev/lkml traffic, including a tulip-specific maintenance patch and later treewide cleanups; no removal discussion was found in the gathered evidence. Web search returned LKDDb coverage for broad supported hardware and Intel's discontinued/no-support statement. Conclusion: hardware is clearly obsolete and only plausibly survives in legacy physical installs or niche old-VM setups, but upstream still does occasional maintenance, so deprecate/remove would be premature; keep the driver, but annotate it as legacy.