Marvell OCTEON TX CPT cryptographic accelerator
The cryptographic and compression engine built into Marvell's (formerly Cavium's) original OCTEON TX CN82xx/CN83xx infrastructure processors, used in networking and security appliances around 2018-2020 to offload bulk symmetric crypto and authenticated-encryption work from the ARM cores.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as legacy hardware. The original OCTEON TX family was superseded by OCTEON TX2 in 2020 (which has its own octeontx2-cpt driver) and OCTEON 10, and Marvell no longer lists it as a current product. However, the driver was still receiving real bug fixes as recently as late 2024, with backports into stable trees, so deployed appliances are clearly still in the field and removing it would hurt those users.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The driver was still receiving substantive fixes in late 2024 ('crypto: octeontx - Fix authenc setkey'), so it is not abandoned upstream.
- lore.kernel.org
That late-2024 fix was also carried into stable trees, indicating ongoing deployed-user relevance.
- cateee.net
LKDDb identifies this as the Marvell OcteonTX CPT driver and maps it to Cavium/ThunderX CPT PCI IDs.
- marvell.com
Marvell's current DPU product page lists OCTEON 10 and OCTEON TX2 families, but not original OCTEON TX, suggesting original OcteonTX is no longer a current-sales family.
- marvell.com
Marvell announced OCTEON TX2 in March 2020 as the latest family, supporting the view that original OcteonTX had already been superseded for new deployments by 2020.
- marvell.com
The original OCTEON TX CN82XX/CN83XX collateral is tied to a 2019-era product brief, reinforcing that this driver targets an older generation.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver, not an early-exit case. lore_file_timeline on otx_cptvf_main.c showed touches through 2026, mostly stable-tree carry; lore_activity on otx_cptvf_algs.c surfaced a concrete 2024 functional fix and stable backports. lore_substr_subject('remove octeontx') found DPDK octeontx2 removals, not a Linux-kernel removal thread for this driver. Web search found Marvell's current product page and press release showing TX2/10 as current families while original OcteonTX appears only in older collateral. That combination points to legacy-but-still-deployed hardware: keep the driver, but annotate it as older/superseded rather than deprecate or remove.