Cavium/Marvell OCTEON SoC built-in Ethernet
On-chip Ethernet support for Cavium (later Marvell) OCTEON, OCTEON II, and OCTEON III MIPS64 system-on-chip processors, including parts up through the CN70xx/CN71xx generation. These SoCs powered networking appliances, storage gear, industrial controllers, and embedded military/aerospace boxes from the late 2000s through roughly 2019.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as legacy hardware. An attempt to delete this driver in early 2020 did not land, and the code is still actively maintained in the staging tree with fixes arriving as recently as 2025, so existing OCTEON-based appliances continue to receive support. However, Marvell is no longer winning new designs with these MIPS64 parts, deployments are shrinking, and the code lives in staging rather than the mainline networking tree, so its long-term future depends on whether anyone steps up to either clean it up or retire it.
repository signals
sources
- lists.openwall.net
Greg Kroah-Hartman's 2020 staging pull included 'removal of ... octeon ethernet' and a 'staging: octeon: delete driver' commit, showing there was a removal attempt.
- kernel.googlesource.com
Current mirrored staging tree still exposes a dedicated 'staging-octeon' branch, indicating the code still has explicit upstream staging attention rather than being abandoned.
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows CONFIG_OCTEON_ETHERNET remains present through 6.19-rc+HEAD and identifies it as Cavium Networks Octeon Ethernet support in drivers/staging/octeon.
- marvell.com
Marvell's CN70xx/CN71xx OCTEON III brief places this family in SMB/enterprise networking, storage, industrial control, and military/aero embedded uses, consistent with legacy-but-still-deployed appliance niches rather than broad new deployments.
- kernel.googlesource.com
The in-tree TODO states the driver is functional and supports Ethernet on OCTEON+/OCTEON2/OCTEON3 chips at least up to CN7030.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local `rg`/`sed` and local `git -c safe.directory=... log` showed this is an on-SoC Cavium Octeon Ethernet driver with substantive fixes through 2025, so it is not dormant. Lore access via `lei` was unavailable; instead web search/open was used for public archive evidence. Web search opened the 2020 LKML archive URL showing a real removal attempt, but web search/open of current LKDDb and the current gregkh staging mirror show the driver still exists and even has a live `staging-octeon` branch, so that removal did not stick and there is no clear current removal wave. Web search/open of Marvell's 2019 CN70xx/CN71xx brief and the in-tree TODO page tie the driver to older OCTEON embedded/networking SoCs; that implies legacy appliance/industrial deployments remain possible, but new 2025 design wins look unlikely. Result: keep it for now, but annotate it as legacy/staging hardware with low contemporary deployment and no obvious in-tree replacement.