IndustryPack (IPACK) bus and TEWS TPCI200 carrier support
IndustryPack is a small mezzanine card standard from the 1990s used in industrial control, physics experiments, and instrumentation — small I/O modules plug into a carrier board that sits on PCI or similar in a host system. The Linux subtree provides the IPACK bus core, the TEWS TPCI200 PCI-to-IndustryPack carrier, and the IPOCTAL serial module driver.
recommendation
A candidate for future removal because the primary hardware it targets — the TEWS TPCI200 carrier — went end-of-life with a last-time-buy in February 2022, and upstream activity on the subtree is limited to mechanical treewide cleanups rather than feature work. It still ships in current kernels and may be running in installed industrial systems, so outright removal is premature, but it warrants flagging as legacy and watching for an orphan status.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Recent upstream touch on drivers/ipack/ipack.c was a 2024 driver-core treewide constification change, indicating the directory still compiles but is not seeing device-specific feature work or active removal discussion.
- tews.com
The TEWS TPCI200 carrier board supported by the in-tree tpci200 driver is marked discontinued with last-time-buy 2022-02-28.
- cateee.net
LKDDb still lists CONFIG_BOARD_TPCI200 in current kernel series, showing the driver remains shipped upstream for TEWS TPCI200 hardware.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection showed drivers/ipack is a real hardware-support subtree: an IPACK bus core plus TEWS TPCI200 carrier and IPOCTAL device drivers, aimed at industrial control. lore_file_timeline on drivers/ipack/ipack.c found only sparse recent activity and no removal-thread signal; the cited lore URL came from that MCP call. TEWS product evidence was obtained by web search and shows the directly supported carrier is discontinued with last-time-buy in 2022. LKDDb URL was obtained by web search and confirms the driver is still present in modern kernels. Overall: legacy industrial hardware, still potentially deployed in installed systems, but weak upstream attention and discontinued primary supported hardware argue for deprecate rather than immediate remove.