Atheros AR813x/AR815x Gigabit and Fast Ethernet NICs
PCI/PCIe Ethernet controllers from the Atheros (originally Attansic) L1C family, including the AR8131, AR8132, AR8151, and AR8152 chips that were widely embedded in consumer and business laptops from roughly 2010 through 2013, notably across Dell's Inspiron, Vostro, and Alienware lines of that era.
recommendation
Worth keeping but worth flagging as a legacy driver. The chips have not shipped in new hardware for over a decade, but plenty of early-2010s laptops with these built-in NICs are still in service, and the code is still receiving routine upkeep upstream (most recently a treewide netdev API refresh in July 2025). There is no successor driver covering its PCI IDs, so removing it would strand working machines, but new feature work has effectively stopped.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
atl1c still received an upstream touch in July 2025, as part of a netdev treewide API update, so it is not abandoned in-tree.
- cateee.net
CONFIG_ATL1C remains present in current kernels and LKDDb maps it to Qualcomm Atheros/Attansic L1C-family PCI IDs including AR8132/AR8151/AR8152-class devices.
- dell.com
Dell still published AR8151/AR8152 packages for Inspiron/Vostro/Alienware notebook platforms in late 2013, indicating mainstream OEM deployment was tied to early-2010s laptops rather than modern systems.
- dell.com
Dell's 2010 AR8151/AR8152 package lists multiple Inspiron models, consistent with broad consumer-laptop availability around 2010-2011.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Kernel source inspection via shell shows a real PCI Ethernet driver for Attansic/Atheros L1C-family IDs and no obvious in-tree successor covering the same PCI IDs. lore_file_timeline on atl1c_main.c showed steady activity through 2025, but the visible recent work is almost entirely treewide/API-maintenance rather than new feature work or removal prep; a follow-up lore_regex removal query timed out, and a shell lei query failed due local socket permissions, so I found no concrete removal thread evidence. Web search yielded LKDDb plus Dell OEM driver pages tying the hardware to 2010-2013 notebook generations. Conclusion: hardware is obsolete for new sales, but there is still a legacy installed base and enough upstream maintenance signal to keep the driver, with annotation that it serves aging laptop NICs and sees mostly opportunistic upkeep.