Atheros/Attansic L1E Gigabit Ethernet (AR8121/AR8113/AR8114)
Onboard PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controllers that Attansic and then Atheros built into consumer desktops and laptops in the late 2000s and early 2010s, covering the AR8121, AR8113, and AR8114 chips found on many budget motherboards of that era.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting its niche because the hardware hasn't shipped on new machines since around 2011, when Qualcomm absorbed Atheros, yet the code is still receiving real upstream fixes as recently as 2024 and 2026 on the netdev list. There is no newer shared driver that takes over these PCI IDs, so removing it would strand the older PCs that still rely on it.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
atl1e still receives device-specific upstream fixes as of 2026-04-22, indicating the driver is not abandoned.
- lore.kernel.org
atl1e was included in a 2024 net-next networking maintenance patch, showing it remains build-tested and maintained in-tree.
- cateee.net
CONFIG_ATL1E still exists in current kernels and covers Qualcomm Atheros device IDs 1969:1026 and 1969:1066 for the Atheros L1E family.
- en.wikipedia.org
Atheros acquired Attansic in 2007 and was itself acquired by Qualcomm in 2011, placing this Ethernet family in an older pre-2012 PC chipset generation rather than new 2025 designs.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
lore_file_timeline on atl1e_main.c returned recent 2026 and 2024 lore URLs and no removal evidence; a lore_regex removal scan returned no hits; local rg confirmed the driver targets Attansic/Atheros L1E IDs and is a real PCI NIC driver; web search found the LKDDb page and Wikipedia Atheros page. Hardware appears legacy desktop/laptop onboard Ethernet from the late-2000s/early-2010s, so new-sales evidence is absent, but upstream bug-fix traffic argues against deprecate/remove. Natural replacement driver is unclear because atl1e covers its own older PCI IDs rather than handing off to a newer shared driver.