Netronome and Corigine NFP-4000/6000 SmartNIC core support
Low-level PCIe and CPP (Command/Push/Pull) bus plumbing for Netronome's NFP-3800/4000/5000/6000 flow processors, the silicon behind the Agilio CX and FX SmartNICs used for offloaded networking, eBPF/XDP, and OVS acceleration in data centres. Originally from Netronome and now sold by Corigine, these cards remain on the market in 2025.
recommendation
It should stay in the kernel because the underlying Agilio SmartNIC family is still sold new by Corigine (which picked up the product line from Netronome) and the code continues to receive both cleanups and real bug fixes in 2024. Deployments are niche, but this is a live, supported product rather than legacy hardware.
repository signals
sources
- docs.kernel.org
Upstream kernel documentation says the NFP driver supports Netronome/Corigine NFP3800, NFP4000, NFP5000, and NFP6000 devices used in Agilio SmartNICs.
- git.kernel.org
Mainline received a substantive NFP change on 2024-08-29 ('nfp: Convert to use ERR_CAST()'), indicating recent maintenance rather than abandonment.
- git.kernel.org
Mainline received a functional nfpcore fix on 2024-02-02 ('nfp: use correct macro for LengthSelect in BAR config'), showing active bug-fix traffic in this directory.
- corigine.com
Corigine's current Agilio CX product page advertises NFP-4000-based SmartNICs with BUY NOW listings, showing the hardware family is still sold new.
- corigine.com
Corigine's current Agilio FX product page advertises an NFP-4000-based SmartNIC, reinforcing ongoing commercial availability of this chipset family.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection of the directory showed real Netronome NFP PCIe/CPP hardware support code, including NFP4000/NFP6000 references. `lei`/lore MCP was unavailable in this environment, so upstream-attention evidence was taken from local `git log` for the path, then mapped to canonical kernel.org commit URLs by canonical recall; deployment/sales evidence came from web search results on docs.kernel.org and corigine.com. No removal discussion was found, and recent 2024 fixes plus current product pages point to a niche but still-live SmartNIC family, so deprecation is not justified.