Netronome and Corigine NFP3800 Agilio SmartNIC datapath (NFD3)
The NFD3 transmit/receive fast path for Netronome and Corigine Agilio SmartNICs based on the NFP3800 family of network processors. These are programmable 10/25/40/100 Gbps Ethernet adapters used in cloud, telco, and security deployments where offloading packet processing, IPsec, and virtual switching to the NIC matters.
recommendation
It should stay because the code is actively maintained, with substantive commits through August 2025 adding features like IPsec offload, NFP3800 support, and UDP segmentation offload. The hardware vendor Corigine (which took over the Netronome line) was still selling Agilio NFP3800-based SmartNICs new in 2025, and the upstream kernel documentation continues to list these devices as supported. There is no replacement driver in the tree.
repository signals
sources
- docs.kernel.org
Current kernel documentation says the nfp driver supports Netronome and Corigine NFP3800/NFP4000/NFP5000/NFP6000 devices and Agilio SmartNICs.
- corigine.com
Corigine still marketed Agilio GX SmartNICs with NFP-3800 and a 'BUY NOW' path in a page crawled in 2026, supporting that related hardware was still sold new in/after 2025.
- corigine.com
Corigine still advertises the Agilio SmartNIC family, indicating ongoing commercial positioning rather than a purely legacy product line.
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows CONFIG_NFP present through current kernels and lists both Netronome and Corigine PCI IDs including 3800/4000/5000/6000, indicating continued upstream enablement.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection shows this directory is real fast-path driver code under nfp, not helper-only assets. Local `git -c safe.directory=... log -- drivers/net/ethernet/netronome/nfp/nfd3` showed substantive touches from 2022 through 2025-08-18, including functional changes such as IPsec/NFP3800 support, UDP segmentation offload, checksum fixes, and later maintenance updates; a grep for remove/deprecate terms found only routine API cleanup, not a removal series. I obtained all cited URLs via `web.search_query`: kernel docs and LKDDb establish active upstream support and covered PCI families; Corigine product pages establish that NFP3800-based Agilio hardware was still sold/marketed in 2025-era/2026-crawled pages. Because the code is recently maintained and the hardware line is still commercially available, removal or deprecation is not justified; there is no natural upstream replacement driver separate from `nfp` itself.