NetXen NX2031 and NX3031 1/10 GbE server adapters
A family of 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express server network adapters built around NetXen's NX2031 and NX3031 "Intelligent NIC" silicon, sold from roughly 2008 onward and rebadged by QLogic after it acquired NetXen in 2009. They were aimed at data-center servers of that era and largely disappeared from the market by the mid-2010s.
recommendation
A candidate for future removal because the hardware is a late-2000s server NIC line from NetXen, which QLogic acquired in 2009 before itself being absorbed in 2016. Vendor driver releases tapered off around 2015 and recent kernel activity is almost entirely treewide API cleanups rather than real bug fixes, with the last device-specific fix dating to early 2021. It still works for the dwindling pool of users running these cards, but it has no future and could reasonably be retired once that installed base fades.
repository signals
sources
- cateee.net
LKDDb maps CONFIG_NETXEN_NIC to this driver and lists NetXen 1/10GbE PCI IDs including NX2031-class boards and device 0100 as the NX3031 multifunction adapter.
- networkcomputing.com
NetXen publicly announced immediate availability of NX3031 in August 2008, anchoring the family as a late-2000s server NIC generation.
- treexy.com
A cataloged NX3031 Windows driver listing shows releases through 30 November 2015, supporting the view that mainstream vendor-era availability peaked long before 2025.
- en.wikipedia.org
QLogic is described as defunct in 2016 and notes its 2009 acquisition of NetXen, consistent with this being a legacy acquired product line rather than a current one.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local inspection via `exec_command` of `drivers/net/ethernet/qlogic/netxen/netxen_nic_main.c` identified PCI support for NX2031 and NX3031 boards and a module description for QLogic/NetXen 1/10GbE NICs. Local `git -c safe.directory=... log -- drivers/net/ethernet/qlogic/netxen` showed recent touches through 2024-12-16, but almost all visible 2021-2026 changes are treewide API/cleanup churn; the last clearly device-specific functional fix in the sampled history was 2021-01-07 ('fix MSI/MSI-x interrupts'). I attempted lore-first evidence using `lei q`, but `lei` was unavailable in this environment; fallback web searches against lore found no obvious active removal thread or sustained bug-fix traffic. Web sources were obtained with `web.search_query`/`web.open`/`web.find`. Overall this looks like legacy server NIC hardware still kept buildable upstream, with low but nonzero installed-base use, so deprecate is a better fit than remove.