linux-drivers/
drivers/net/ethernet/atheros/atlx

Attansic/Atheros L1 and L2 PCI/PCIe Ethernet NICs

Onboard gigabit (L1) and 10/100 (L2) Ethernet controllers from Attansic, which Atheros acquired in 2007. They appeared on budget desktop and laptop motherboards in the late 2000s, with PCI IDs 1969:1048 and 1969:2048, and have not shipped on new hardware for well over a decade.

keep-annotate conf=0.82 last_sold=2009 deploy=low replacement=none subsystem=net category=networking-ethernet
82%

recommendation

Worth keeping but documenting as legacy because the chips were last common on roughly 2009-era motherboards and are not designed into anything new, yet they still turn up in hundreds of Linux-Hardware probe reports and the driver was still receiving bug fixes upstream in 2025 (a July 2025 stable backport added missing DMA mapping error checks). Removal would strand a real, if shrinking, installed base, so an annotation flagging it as legacy hardware is the appropriate step today.

repository signals

7 files
8,767 source lines
14 commits, 5y
+99 / −59 lines added / removed, 5y
12 authors, 5y
monthly commits · 2021-04-21 → 2026-04-21 · 14 total · active in 13/61 months
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sources

  1. lore.kernel.org

    Lore shows non-removal maintenance in 2025: a stable backport titled 'ethernet: atl1: Add missing DMA mapping error checks and count errors' for atl1.c.

  2. cateee.net

    LKDDb maps CONFIG_ATL1 to drivers/net/ethernet/atheros/atlx/atl1.c and PCI ID 1969:1048 ('Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet').

  3. cateee.net

    LKDDb maps CONFIG_ATL2 to drivers/net/ethernet/atheros/atlx/atl2.c and PCI ID 1969:2048 ('Attansic L2 Fast Ethernet').

  4. linux-hardware.org

    Linux-Hardware shows Attansic L1 present in many probe reports (status page shows 573 reports), indicating legacy installed-base use rather than new-system design wins.

  5. linux-hardware.org

    A recent indexed probe ties Attansic L2 (atl2) to a 2009 desktop platform, supporting the view that deployments are on old motherboards rather than new 2025 hardware.

codex reasoning notes (technical)

Source acquisition: lore_activity on drivers/net/ethernet/atheros/atlx/atl1.c produced the 2025 lore URL; local source grep confirmed the directory contains ATL1/ATL2 PCI drivers for Attansic/Atheros L1/L2; web search found LKDDb pages for ATL1/ATL2 and Linux-Hardware device/probe pages. Recommendation: old 10/100 and 1GbE PCIe onboard NICs from the late-2000s are not credible new-2025 sales targets, and Linux-Hardware suggests only a residual legacy installed base. However, upstream still accepted bug-fix traffic in 2025 and there is no evidence here of an active removal series, so removal/deprecation would be premature; keep the driver but annotate it as legacy/low-deployment hardware.