Silan SC92031 PCI Fast Ethernet adapter
A low-cost 10/100 Mbps PCI Ethernet chip from Chinese vendor Silan Microelectronics, found on budget add-in network cards in the mid-to-late 2000s. It targets a narrow set of PCI IDs (notably SILAN 2031 and a Realtek-cloned 8139 variant) and was never widely adopted outside that niche.
recommendation
A candidate for future removal because the hardware is an obscure legacy PCI Fast Ethernet chip that hasn't been sold new in many years and has very few remaining users. The code still receives occasional treewide API cleanups (most recently in late 2024), but there is no sign of device-specific bug fixes or active maintainers, suggesting it could reasonably be deprecated and eventually retired if no users surface.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The driver still receives occasional upstream treewide/API-maintenance touches as of 2024-11-25, rather than being entirely untouched.
- git.kernel.org
Upstream Kconfig describes this as the 'Silan SC92031 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter driver', i.e. a specific PCI 10/100 Ethernet chip family.
- git.kernel.org
The driver binds only a tiny PCI ID set for Silan SC92031-class hardware, including SILAN:2031 and SILAN:8139, indicating narrow hardware scope.
- silan.com.cn
The in-tree driver comment points to a dedicated SC92031AY datasheet, corroborating that this is an old discrete vendor NIC chip rather than a broadly reused modern platform block.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
`lore_file_timeline` on `drivers/net/ethernet/silan/sc92031.c` showed recent activity in 2024, but the visible hits were treewide/API-maintenance patches, not clear device-specific fixes or removal discussion; that argues against immediate removal. `exec_command` reading `Kconfig` and `sc92031.c` identified the hardware as a narrow PCI Fast Ethernet chip with a small PCI ID table and a vendor-datasheet URL. The two kernel.org URLs are canonical recall for the same in-tree files inspected locally; the datasheet URL was obtained from the `exec_command` output; the lore URL was obtained from `lore_file_timeline`. Based on that evidence, plus the legacy PCI 100Mb form factor and absence of evidence for current-market sales, this looks like legacy-only hardware with low remaining deployments, so `deprecate` fits better than `keep` or `remove`.