Marvell OCTEON PCIe Endpoint Virtual Function NICs
Guest-side network support for Marvell's OCTEON DPU and SmartNIC silicon (CN93xx, CN98xx, and CN10K including CNF variants) when the card is sliced into PCIe virtual functions for use by VMs or containers. The hardware is current-generation, used in cloud servers, 5G and carrier gear, and enterprise SmartNICs with 200/400GbE.
recommendation
It should stay because the underlying OCTEON 10 DPU and SmartNIC products are actively marketed by Marvell in 2025 for datacenter, 5G, and carrier deployments, and the code is receiving substantive upstream fixes as recently as March 2026. There is no replacement: the companion physical-function driver octeon_ep covers a different role and does not subsume the VF use case.
repository signals
sources
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows CONFIG_OCTEON_EP_VF in mainline kernels 6.9-6.19 and lists supported Cavium/Marvell VF PCI IDs including b103, b203, b403, b903, ba03, bc03, bd03.
- marvell.com
Marvell still markets OCTEON 10 and related DPU platforms for cloud, 5G, enterprise, carrier, and SmartNIC/networking equipment use cases, indicating the family remains a current product line.
- marvell.com
The OCTEON 10 DPU platform brief describes active datacenter, 5G, enterprise, and carrier deployment targets and modern I/O such as PCIe 5.0 and 200/400GbE, supporting continued new deployments in 2025.
- git.kernel.org
Recent upstream history includes a substantive 2026-03-03 fix ('octeon_ep_vf: avoid compiler and IQ/OQ reordering'), indicating ongoing maintenance rather than retirement.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver directory: local shell inspection found module/Kconfig entry and VF PCI IDs for CN93xx/CN98xx/CN10K-family parts. Local `git log` on the directory showed multiple substantive fixes in 2025-2026, with the latest on 2026-03-03, so upstream attention is active and I found no removal/deprecation signal. `https://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/OCTEON_EP_VF.html`, `https://www.marvell.com/products/infrastructure-processors/multi-core-processors/octeon-tx.html`, and the Marvell product-brief PDF URL were obtained via web search. The git.kernel.org commit URL was added by canonical recall from the locally observed commit hash. Because this is a VF driver for currently marketed OCTEON DPU/SmartNIC silicon, there is no natural replacement driver beyond the PF-side `octeon_ep`, which does not replace the VF use case.