esd CAN-PCIe/402 industrial CAN bus interface family
A family of industrial CAN bus interface cards from German vendor esd GmbH, built around their esdACC controller and sold in PCIe, M.2, and CompactPCI form factors as the CAN-PCIe/402, CAN-M.2/402, and CPCI-CAN/402. They are used in factory automation, vehicle test rigs, and other industrial settings where a Linux host needs to talk to CAN networks, and they remain current products in 2025.
recommendation
It should stay in the kernel because the hardware is current, actively sold, and the driver is being maintained. esd added it upstream in late 2023, added a one-shot transmit feature in 2024, and pushed a transmit-path bug fix as recently as October 2025, which is exactly the cadence of a healthy niche driver.
repository signals
sources
- git.kernel.org
Driver support for the esd GmbH PCIe/402 CAN interface family was added upstream in late 2023, so this is a recently introduced driver rather than legacy carry-over.
- git.kernel.org
The driver received feature work in 2024 (one-shot mode), indicating active functional maintenance.
- git.kernel.org
The driver received a non-mechanical transmit-path fix in October 2025, showing current upstream attention.
- esd.eu
esd still markets the CAN-PCIe/402 as a current product with Linux driver support and order/request flow on the vendor site.
- esd.eu
The vendor also markets M.2 members of the same 402 family in 2025, showing ongoing new deployments of the esdACC-based platform.
- esd.eu
The 402 family is still offered in CompactPCI industrial form factors, supporting continued niche industrial deployment rather than pure legacy status.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local source inspection via shell (`rg`, `sed`) identified `esd_402_pci` as a PCIe SocketCAN driver for esdACC-based CAN-PCI(e)/402 boards. Upstream activity was checked with local `git log` on the directory and matching subjects; it showed 2024 feature work and a 2025 bug-fix path, with no removal-oriented matches. Kernel commit URLs are canonical-recall links constructed from those locally observed commit hashes. Vendor product URLs were obtained by web search and show the 402 family still sold across PCIe, M.2, and CompactPCI variants. This points to a current industrial niche driver with active maintenance and no natural in-tree replacement.