Adaptec AIC-6915 Starfire / DuraLAN PCI Ethernet adapters
A family of late-1990s 10/100 Mbps PCI Ethernet server cards built around Adaptec's AIC-6915 Starfire controller, sold as the DuraLAN ANA-620xx and ANA-69011A series. They were positioned as 32/64-bit PCI NICs for servers and workstations of that era.
recommendation
A candidate for future removal because the hardware is a late-1990s server NIC that is long out of production, upstream Linux activity has been limited to occasional treewide cleanups with no real feature work, and FreeBSD already dropped its equivalent driver in version 13.0. There is no active removal patch in flight and some old servers or industrial machines may still rely on these cards, so deprecation rather than immediate removal is the more cautious call.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Recent upstream attention was a small cleanup patch removing unused structs from `starfire.c`, not evidence of new feature work or renewed deployment.
- cateee.net
LKDDb identifies this as Adaptec Starfire/DuraLAN support for old Adaptec ANA-620xx/ANA-69011A PCI adapters, and notes older 32-bit boards used `tulip` instead.
- manualzilla.com
The AIC-6915 programmer's manual describes a 1998-era 10/100 Ethernet LAN controller with 32/64-bit PCI, indicating late-1990s server NIC hardware rather than current-market gear.
- manpages.ubuntu.com
FreeBSD's `sf` man page still documents AIC-6915 boards but also states the driver is absent in FreeBSD 13.0 and later, reinforcing that this hardware family is legacy-only in current OS ecosystems.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
`starfire.c` identifies the hardware as the Adaptec 6915 Starfire 64-bit PCI Ethernet adapter. `lore_file_timeline` on `drivers/net/ethernet/adaptec/starfire.c` showed sparse 2021-2024 touches dominated by treewide churn plus one 2024 cleanup; no active removal thread was found, so this does not justify `remove`. Web search yielded LKDDb for supported boards/use, the AIC-6915 manual for the chipset's late-1990s 10/100 PCI positioning, and the Ubuntu-hosted FreeBSD man page showing the same family is already dropped there. Taken together: upstream Linux activity is minimal, the hardware is clearly legacy PCI Fast Ethernet, likely still present only in old servers/industrial systems, and there is no single upstream replacement driver for the exact cards, so `deprecate` fits better than `remove`.