Qualcomm Atheros AR6003 and AR6004 mobile Wi-Fi chipsets
Supports Atheros AR6003 and AR6004 low-power Wi-Fi chipsets that connected over SDIO or USB, commonly embedded in smartphones, tablets, and small embedded boards from roughly the early 2010s. These were Qualcomm Atheros' mobile-oriented WLAN parts, distinct from the PCIe-based ath9k/ath10k families.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as a legacy driver. The AR6003/AR6004 chipsets it supports were embedded Wi-Fi parts found in older smartphones, tablets, and SDIO/USB modules, and no current driver replaces them. Mainline activity is modest but real (around 46 substantive commits over the last five years from 29 authors, with a touch as recent as June 2025), so it remains maintained even though the hardware is no longer sold and deployments are limited to surviving legacy devices.
repository signals
sources
- git.kernel.org
Kernel Kconfig describes ath6kl as support for Atheros AR6003 and AR6004 mobile chipsets, with separate SDIO and USB bus drivers.
- git.kernel.org
Canonical upstream log location for assessing whether ath6kl still receives maintenance in mainline.
- cateee.net
LKDDb records ath6kl as a current Linux wireless driver family, reinforcing that it still exists upstream and covers legacy Atheros mobile WLAN devices.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell read of Kconfig identified the chipset family as AR6003/AR6004 and bus scope as SDIO/USB; sources above are canonical-recall URLs for that same upstream material. lore_file_timeline on the directory prefix returned no directory-scoped events, and a lore_regex removal-subject scan timed out, so I relied on the user-supplied history metadata: 46 substantive commits in 5y, 29 authors, and a latest substantive touch on 2025-06-27. That level of recent upkeep argues against deprecate/remove. The hardware itself is an older mobile/embedded WLAN generation and likely only persists in legacy devices, so deployments are low and the right stance is keep-annotate rather than removal. No natural replacement driver covers the same AR6003/AR6004 hardware.