National Instruments DAQ signal routing tables (E Series, M Series, and 660x)
Auto-generated lookup tables that tell the Comedi data-acquisition stack which internal signal routes are legal on National Instruments multifunction DAQ cards, including the older E Series, the M Series that replaced them, and the 660x counter/timer boards. The tables are consumed by NI's Comedi drivers rather than being a driver in their own right.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting its niche role, since this is metadata feeding the NI Comedi drivers rather than a standalone driver. E Series and M Series hardware is formally discontinued by NI (the PXI-6070 and PCI-6251 pages now point to X Series replacements), but 660x boards such as the PCI-6602 still appear on NI's shop pages around 2025, so a small user base remains. No removal discussion exists on the mailing lists and the subtree has barely changed since Comedi left staging in 2021.
repository signals
sources
- git.kernel.org
The ni_routing subtree exists to encode valid routing tables for National Instruments DAQ families; the README describes per-family route-value tables and notes NI-MAX as the only consistent source for many valid routes.
- git.kernel.org
ni_routing entered the main drivers/comedi tree in April 2021 when comedi moved out of staging, matching the directory's short upstream lifetime.
- git.kernel.org
Local git history shows the only non-linux-next touch after the move was a 2021 cleanup commit, consistent with very low ongoing upstream churn.
- ni.com
NI's current comparison document treats 60xxE, 62xx, and 63xx as successive generations, indicating M Series superseded E Series and X Series superseded M Series.
- ni.com
NI marks the M Series PCI-6251 as 'Item no longer available' and points buyers to PCIe-6351 as replacement hardware.
- ni.com
NI marks the E Series PXI-6070 as 'Item no longer available' with PXIe-6361 as replacement hardware.
- ni.com
NI still has a current shop page for PCI-6602 with pricing/contact flow, indicating at least some 660x-family hardware remained commercially offered around 2025-2026.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection showed this directory is generated routing metadata used by NI comedi support, not a standalone end-user driver. `lore_file_timeline` on the directory path returned 0 events in the last 5 years, and `lore_regex` for diff headers under this path also returned 0 hits, so there is no visible lore removal/maintenance discussion to justify `remove`. URLs were obtained as follows: NI product/white-paper pages via `web.search_query`; kernel.org README/commit pages via canonical recall after extracting the relevant paths and commit IDs from local `git log`/source reads. Because E/M families are obsolete but PCI-6602-class 660x hardware still appears market-active, present deployments look niche rather than extinct, so the safer call is `keep-annotate` rather than deprecate/remove.