SiS 900/7016 and SiS190/191 PCI Fast Ethernet controllers
Integrated Fast Ethernet (10/100 Mbps) and Gigabit controllers built into Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) southbridge chipsets used on budget PC motherboards from roughly the late 1990s through the mid-2000s. The sis900 part covers the 900/7016 cores embedded in SiS 630/540-class chipsets, while sis190 covers the SiS190/191 Gigabit controllers found alongside the SiS 965/966 southbridges.
recommendation
Worth keeping but worth flagging as legacy. The hardware is long out of production and deployments today are low, but both drivers are still receiving routine upstream maintenance — a 2025 conversion to the modern PCI devres API and a 2026 cleanup that switched sis900 to module_pci_driver — which shows they are not abandoned and still serve people running old SiS-chipset motherboards. No removal series is in flight, so there is no reason to drop them, only to note their niche status.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The directory still receives upstream attention in 2026; a net-next patch touched sis900 as a maintenance cleanup ('use module_pci_driver; remove useless driver versions').
- lore.kernel.org
sis900 also saw maintenance-oriented API cleanup in 2025 ('Use pure PCI devres API'), indicating the driver is not abandoned upstream.
- cateee.net
LKDDb identifies sis900 as support for SiS 900/7016 PCI Fast Ethernet and notes the SiS 900 core was embedded in SiS 630/540 chipsets, pointing to legacy PCI / motherboard-integrated hardware.
- cateee.net
LKDDb identifies sis190 as support for SiS190/SiS191 and says these chips appear on motherboards based on SiS 965/966 south bridges, again indicating legacy motherboard-integrated hardware rather than modern discrete NICs.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver directory with two PCI Ethernet drivers (local rg/sed on Kconfig and .c files). Lore evidence came from mcp__lore_http__.lore_file_timeline on sis900.c and sis190.c; the cited lore URLs were returned directly by that tool. Deployment looks low because both drivers target old SiS PCI / southbridge-integrated Ethernet families, and the web URLs were obtained via web search results (cateee LKDDb pages). I found recent maintenance traffic but no concrete removal-series evidence in the timeline results, so this is better classified as keep-annotate than deprecate/remove.