ARCNET COM90xx and COM20020 industrial network adapters
ARCNET is a token-passing LAN technology from the late 1970s that briefly competed with Ethernet in offices during the 1980s. These drivers cover the SMSC COM90xx and COM20020 chipsets used on ISA, PCI, PCMCIA, PC/104, and PCIe cards, which today survive almost exclusively in factory-floor and embedded industrial-control wiring.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting as a legacy industrial niche. ARCNET disappeared from mainstream office networking in the early 1990s, but Contemporary Controls still sells new COM20020-based PCIe and PC/104 cards in 2025 for industrial control buses, and the kernel code is still receiving real fixes (a 2.5 Mbit card fix landed as recently as April 2026). There is no replacement driver for this hardware class, so removal would strand active users; an annotation flagging it as a niche legacy subsystem would set expectations correctly.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
As of 2026-04-13, ARCNET still receives targeted functional fixes upstream/stable: "net: arcnet: com20020-pci: fix support for 2.5Mbit cards".
- lore.kernel.org
ARCNET touched recent stable releases in 2026, indicating maintained code rather than abandoned dead code.
- ccontrols.com
A vendor was still selling new ARCNET PCI Express cards in 2025-era catalogs, so the hardware class was not fully extinct.
- ccontrols.com
A vendor was still selling new COM20020-based ARCNET PC/104 modules, consistent with ongoing industrial/embedded niche deployments.
- ccontrols.com
Contemporary Controls markets ARCNET for industrial control and lists active ARCNET hubs/NIMs across ISA, PC/104, PCI, USB, and PCIe, supporting current niche deployment evidence.
- en.wikipedia.org
ARCNET is a legacy LAN technology whose mainstream market declined long ago, but it retained an industrial-control niche.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Kernel tree inspection via shell showed ARCNET core plus COM90xx/COM20020 ISA/PCI/PCMCIA drivers. lore_file_timeline on drivers/net/arcnet/com20020-pci.c returned 2026 stable traffic and a specific functional fix URL; lore_file_timeline on arcnet.c showed mainly treewide maintenance, not removal discussion. Web search found Contemporary Controls product pages for new ARCNET PCIe and PC/104 hardware plus an ARCNET product-family page, so hardware is still sold new but only in a narrow industrial niche. Wikipedia from web search supports that broad market availability ended decades ago; 1992 is an inference from that decline point, so confidence is moderate there. No natural upstream replacement driver exists for ARCNET hardware, so this should be kept but clearly annotated as legacy/niche rather than deprecated for removal.