QLogic/NetXen QLCNIC 10GbE Converged Network Adapters
A family of 10 Gigabit Ethernet converged network adapters originally from NetXen and QLogic (later Marvell), including the QLE8240/8242 and QLE8440/8442 series, that combined Ethernet, FCoE, and iSCSI offload on a single PCIe card. They were widely deployed in enterprise servers and storage appliances from roughly 2010 through the late 2010s.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting as legacy hardware. The cards are no longer sold new (a major retailer lists the QLE8242 as discontinued) but Marvell's 2022 user guide still covers the QLE8440/8442 and the adapters remain in service inside appliances such as Veritas NetBackup, so removing the driver would strand existing users. Two memory-leak fixes landed upstream in 2025, showing the code is still being maintained rather than abandoned.
repository signals
sources
- kernelconfig.io
CONFIG_QLCNIC covers the qlcnic driver directory and describes it as support for QLogic QLE8240/QLE8242 converged Ethernet devices.
- git.kernel.org
The driver received a qlcnic-specific bug fix in 2025 ('fix memory leak in qlcnic_sriov_channel_cfg_cmd()'), showing recent upstream maintenance.
- git.kernel.org
The driver received another qlcnic-specific bug fix in 2025 ('fix memory leak issues in qlcnic_sriov_common.c'), indicating nontrivial upkeep rather than abandonment.
- marvell.com
Marvell's 2022 user guide still documents QLE8440/QLE8442 products supported by this driver family, showing the hardware remained supported in vendor documentation into the 2020s.
- bhphotovideo.com
A mainstream retailer lists QLE8242 as 'No Longer Available', supporting the view that these adapters are no longer broadly sold new.
- veritas.com
Veritas documentation for NetBackup appliances references QLE8442, indicating ongoing legacy/appliance deployments rather than zero use.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection of qlogic Kconfig and qlcnic headers showed QLE824x plus 83xx/84xx PCI IDs, so this is a real NIC driver with SR-IOV/DCB support and no obvious in-tree replacement for the same hardware. Upstream attention was checked via local `git log` fallback because `lore-http` MCP was unavailable in this session and `lei` was not installed; the two cited kernel.org commit URLs were derived from shell-obtained commit hashes and canonical kernel.org commit URL format. Web search obtained the kernelconfig, Marvell, B&H, and Veritas URLs. Overall signal: legacy 10GbE CNA hardware with some appliance/installed-base presence and recent bug-fix traffic, so keep the driver but annotate it as legacy rather than deprecate/remove.