PCMCIA SCSI host adapter cards (Adaptec, Future Domain, NinjaSCSI, QLogic, Symbios)
Credit-card-sized SCSI host adapters that slotted into PCMCIA/PC Card bays on laptops from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, letting portables talk to external SCSI scanners, tape drives, CD-RW burners, and disks. Supported cards include Adaptec AHA-152X clones, Future Domain, Workbit NinjaSCSI, QLogic FAS408, and Symbios 53c500.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as legacy. The PC Card slot itself was superseded by ExpressCard in 2003 and largely vanished from laptops by the early 2010s, so almost nobody is plugging these adapters into a modern machine. However, the code is not abandoned: the qlogic_cs sub-driver still received real bug fixes as recently as 2023, so the maintenance burden is low and removing it would strand the few hobbyists and retrocomputing users who still rely on these cards.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
At least one driver in this directory (qlogic_cs) still received targeted functional fixes in 2023, so the code is not abandoned upstream.
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows this directory still builds the qlogic_cs module and binds legacy PCMCIA-to-SCSI hardware such as the Eiger Labs adapter.
- cateee.net
LKDDb lists supported NinjaSCSI cards bundled with period devices like CD-RW drives, indicating a legacy late-1990s/early-2000s hardware class rather than current products.
- en.wikipedia.org
PC Card/PCMCIA was superseded by ExpressCard in 2003, and many laptops had no such slots by 2011, implying very low modern deployment for PCMCIA SCSI adapters.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Not an early-exit case: this is a real kernel driver directory with PCMCIA SCSI host drivers. Upstream history was checked via lore_activity on drivers/scsi/pcmcia/qlogic_stub.c; it showed real non-treewide fixes in 2022-2023 and broader API churn touches, with no removal evidence found in the sampled lore results. Deployment evidence came from web search results for LKDDb pages and the canonical PC Card article: the supported devices are legacy PCMCIA adapters tied to an interface already superseded in 2003 and effectively absent from mainstream laptops by the 2010s. The 2006 date is an inference from the PC Card to ExpressCard transition period, not a vendor EOL date. Because the hardware is obsolete but the code still sees occasional maintenance, keep the driver but annotate it as legacy rather than deprecating or removing it.