SiS and XGI Volari integrated/discrete graphics framebuffer
Console and basic 2D display support for integrated and discrete graphics chips from Silicon Integrated Systems (the SiS 300, 315, 330, and 340 families found in late-1990s and early-2000s SiS chipset motherboards) and for the XGI Volari V3XT/V5/V8/Z7 cards that SiS's spinoff XGI Technology sold between 2003 and 2010.
recommendation
A candidate for future removal because the supported hardware — Silicon Integrated Systems graphics from around 2000-2003 and the XGI Volari cards that followed — has been out of production for well over a decade, and XGI itself shut down in 2010. The code still builds and saw a minor cleanup in June 2025, but that activity was housekeeping rather than real development, and only a handful of old desktops, embedded boxes, and industrial systems are likely still running it.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Recent upstream activity exists in 2025, but it is maintenance cleanup ('fbdev/sisfb: Unexport symbols'), not evidence of growing deployment.
- cateee.net
The driver covers SiS 300/315/330/340 and XGI V3XT/V5/V8/Z7 and is still present in current kernel configuration options.
- en.wikipedia.org
The supported SiS graphics chipsets are from the late-1990s/early-2000s era, e.g. SiS 540 (1999), SiS 630 (2000), and SiS 645/650 with SiS315 (2001).
- en.wikipedia.org
XGI, which supplied the later supported Volari chips, existed from 2003 to 2010, indicating this hardware family has been out of active new-product circulation for many years.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver. lore_file_timeline on drivers/video/fbdev/sis/sis_main.c showed latest substantive touch in June 2025, but the visible traffic is cleanup rather than active feature work or removal. web search + open on LKDDb established exact chipset coverage; web search + open on Wikipedia pages established the chips are early-2000s-era and XGI ended in 2010. That supports deprecate, not remove: still maintained enough to build, but hardware is legacy with only low residual deployments in old desktops/embedded/industrial systems.