Linux May Drop Legacy 3Com, AMD, and Xircom Ethernet Drivers

A proposal on the Linux kernel mailing list suggests removing 18 legacy Ethernet drivers, sparking renewed debate over how long support for aging but still operational hardware should remain in the kernel.

The patch series, submitted by Andrew Lunn, targets a range of drivers from the ISA and PCMCIA era. These include older 3Com drivers such as 3c509, 3c515, 3c574, 3c589, and 3c59x, along with drivers from AMD, SMSC, Cirrus, Fujitsu, Xircom, and the 8390 family. Altogether, the proposal would remove roughly 27,600 lines of code spread across 40 files.

These drivers date back to Ethernet hardware from the early 1990s through the early 2000s—around 25 to 35 years old—reflecting technology from the dial-up and early broadband era, long before gigabit networking became standard on motherboards.

According to Lunn, these drivers historically required minimal maintenance, but recent advances in AI-based code analysis and fuzzing have uncovered more bugs. He argues that continuing to fix issues in such outdated drivers, especially with uncertain real-world usage, is no longer practical. However, the changes were split into separate patches so individual drivers could be restored if someone is willing to maintain them.

That position was quickly challenged. One response pointed out that the 3c59x driver is still actively used in hundreds of industrial PCs equipped with legacy 3Com network cards, with systems regularly updated to modern kernels. This shifted the discussion from routine cleanup to a broader question of how to define “obsolete” versus simply “old.”

For now, no drivers have been removed. While this proposal has little impact on typical users running modern desktops or servers, it carries significant implications for industrial environments, specialized systems, and legacy setups that still depend on these older drivers.