Chelsio T3/T4/T5/T6 Unified Wire iSCSI offload adapters
Chelsio's Unified Wire PCIe network adapters with hardware iSCSI offload, covering the T3 generation through the current T4, T5, and T6 cards. They're niche storage networking hardware aimed at data centers, cloud, and HPC environments where pushing iSCSI work off the host CPU matters; Chelsio has shipped them since the late 2000s and still sells T6 models new.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as a niche, because Chelsio still sells T6 Unified Wire adapters with iSCSI offload in 2025 and the code was still being touched in treewide kernel work that year, yet real-world deployment volumes are low and parts of the T5/T6 lineup are already marked legacy or end-of-life on Chelsio's own site. An annotation would help future maintainers know this is aging specialty hardware rather than mainstream storage gear.
repository signals
sources
- git.kernel.org
Upstream Kconfig describes `SCSI_CXGB3_ISCSI` as Chelsio T3 iSCSI support.
- git.kernel.org
Upstream source identifies `cxgb4i` as the Chelsio T4-T6 iSCSI driver.
- lore.kernel.org
`drivers/scsi/cxgbi/cxgb4i/cxgb4i.c` was still being touched in 2025 treewide work, with no removal/deprecation subject evidence surfaced from lore queries.
- chelsio.com
Chelsio's Unified Wire Adapters page advertises T6 adapters with iSCSI offload for storage/cloud/HPC deployments.
- store.chelsio.com
Chelsio's online store listed T5/T6-era Unified Wire adapters for sale in 2026, including T580 and T62100/T6225 models.
- chelsio.com
Chelsio marks some T5/T6 adapter SKUs as legacy/EOL, showing the family is aging and only partly current.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver subtree: local inspection showed cxgb3i, cxgb4i, and shared libcxgbi code. Kernel.org URLs are canonical recall used to corroborate local source/Kconfig inspection. Lore evidence came from MCP `lore_activity` on `drivers/scsi/cxgbi/cxgb4i/cxgb4i.c`; `lore_file_timeline` on the directory returned no matches and subject searches timed out, so there is no positive removal-thread evidence. Web evidence came from `web.search_query` plus `web.open` on Chelsio product, store, and legacy pages. Net: specialized but still-sold niche storage/offload hardware, low deployment volume, some recent upstream maintenance, so keep but annotate as aging/niche rather than deprecate/remove.