Netronome and Corigine Agilio NFP SmartNIC flower offload
The flow-offload component of the driver for Netronome (and successor Corigine) Agilio SmartNICs built on NFP-3800, NFP-4000, and NFP-5000 silicon. It lets the NIC hardware accelerate Open vSwitch and Linux traffic-control rules so packet classification and forwarding happen on the card instead of the host CPU, mainly in cloud, telco, and data-center deployments.
recommendation
It should stay because the hardware is still being sold new in 2025 by Corigine, the code is actively maintained with stable backports in 2024 and fresh netdev patch traffic in August 2025, and there is no other driver that supports these SmartNICs. Deployments are niche but real, and removing it would strand existing Agilio CX and GX users with no migration path.
repository signals
sources
- spinics.net
Netdev saw nfp/flower patch traffic in August 2025, indicating ongoing upstream maintenance rather than deprecation/removal.
- lists.linaro.org
A March 2024 stable backport for nfp: flower shows bug-fix activity and maintainer sign-off for this code path.
- corigine.com
Corigine was still marketing Agilio CX SmartNICs with NFP-4000/NFP-5000 silicon and TC/OVS-style datapath offload capabilities, supporting that relevant hardware remained on sale in/through 2025.
- corigine.com
Corigine was also marketing Agilio GX SmartNICs with NFP-3800 silicon for OVS/DPDK datapath acceleration, indicating continued though niche deployment relevance.
- help.netronome.com
Vendor support documentation explicitly describes selecting the 'flower' TC-offload firmware for Netronome SmartNICs, matching the driver directory's function and showing real deployment intent.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver code, not a helper-only directory: local shell read of main.c shows the NFP FLOWER app implementing switchdev/TC offload logic under the nfp driver. Upstream activity evidence came from web search results on public mailing-list mirrors after shell tools were unavailable for lore/lei; I found active 2024 stable-backport and 2025 netdev patch threads, and no removal discussion surfaced in targeted lore/web searches. Deployment evidence came from vendor product/support pages found via web search: Corigine still advertised Agilio NFP SmartNICs and Netronome/Corigine documented flower TC-offload firmware usage. Conclusion: hardware is still sold but niche, there is no natural replacement driver for the same cards, so keep.