VIA Rhine and VIA Velocity Ethernet controllers
Two families of inexpensive PCI Ethernet chips that VIA Technologies shipped from the late 1990s into the 2000s: the Rhine I/II/III 10/100 Mbps controllers (often integrated into VIA southbridge chipsets and bargain motherboards) and the Velocity VT6120/6121/6122/6130 gigabit chips found on budget add-in cards and embedded boards.
recommendation
Worth keeping but worth flagging as legacy hardware. The chips are no longer sold new — vendor driver packages tail off around 2006 — but the kernel code is still actively maintained, with a substantive via-rhine fix landing in January 2025. Real-world users today are mostly running older PCs, industrial controllers, and embedded boards that still depend on these controllers, so removing the driver would strand working hardware while costing maintainers very little to keep.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
via-rhine received a substantive upstream bug fix in January 2025, indicating the code is still maintained rather than abandoned.
- cateee.net
The via-rhine driver still exists in current kernels and covers Rhine-I/II/III PCI Ethernet IDs, including legacy integrated southbridge Ethernet variants.
- cateee.net
The via-velocity driver still exists in current kernels and covers the VT6120/VT6121/VT6122/VT6130 gigabit family.
- techspot.com
Public driver-package metadata for VIA Velocity VT6120/VT6122 points to a 2006-era vendor driver release, supporting that this hardware family is long-obsolete in the retail market.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver directory confirmed locally via exec_command: Kconfig plus via-rhine.c and via-velocity.c, with chip names in source comments/help text. lore_file_timeline on via-rhine.c showed steady 2021-2025 activity and a 2025 net fix at the cited lore URL; failed lore_regex/lei removal checks produced no usable removal evidence. Web search returned LKDDb pages for both configs and a 2006 VIA Velocity driver-download page; together this supports keep-annotate: upstream still fixes it, but deployments are now legacy/industrial/embedded only and new 2025 sales are unlikely.