STMicroelectronics Kyro and Kyro II PowerVR3 framebuffer
Framebuffer support for the STMicroelectronics STG4000-based "Kyro" and "Kyro II" PCI/AGP graphics cards, a PowerVR Series 3 consumer 3D graphics family sold around 2000-2001 under names like the Hercules 3D Prophet Kyro. The cards competed briefly with early GeForce and Radeon parts before STMicro exited the PC graphics market.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as a niche legacy driver. The hardware was last widely sold in 2001 and today survives mainly in retro PC collections, yet the code is not abandoned: real bug-fix patches landed as recently as March and July 2025, so removing it would cut off the small but active community of users still running these cards. Documenting it as retro-only would set expectations without disrupting that maintenance.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The driver received substantive upstream maintenance in July 2025 ('Add missing PCI memory region request'), so it is not completely dormant.
- lore.kernel.org
The driver also received a bug-fix style patch in March 2025 ('Add some geometry checks'), indicating real bug-fix traffic rather than pure treewide churn.
- cateee.net
LKDDb maps CONFIG_FB_KYRO to the kyrofb driver and PCI ID 104a:0010 (STG4000 / 3D Prophet Kyro Series), confirming the hardware scope is a single legacy PCI graphics family.
- en.wikipedia.org
PowerVR documentation summary places the STG4000 Kyro generation in 2000, with Kyro II following in 2001, supporting that this is early-2000s consumer graphics hardware rather than current product.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Obsolete early-2000s PCI/AGP graphics hardware, with no evidence from the gathered results that boards are sold new in 2025; current use is most plausibly retro/collector systems, so deployments are low. However, lore history shows genuine maintenance in 2025, which argues against deprecate/remove despite the age of the hardware. No natural hardware-specific upstream successor is evident for this PCI ID, so replacement_driver is null. Source acquisition: the two lore.kernel.org URLs came directly from `lore_file_timeline`; the LKDDb and Wikipedia URLs came from `web.search_query` results. A precise `lei` subject query for removal discussion could not run in this sandbox, and a broad lore regex timed out, so absence of removal talk is an inference from the successful lore evidence rather than a proven negative.