Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG and WiFi Link 4965AGN legacy Wi-Fi adapters
Two generations of Intel laptop Wi-Fi cards from the mid-2000s: the 3945ABG, an 802.11a/b/g Mini PCIe part shipped in Centrino laptops around 2006, and the 4965AGN, an early 802.11n adapter that followed in 2007. They were extremely common in Core Duo and early Core 2 era ThinkPads, Dells, and other notebooks before Intel's newer iwlwifi-supported chips replaced them.
recommendation
It should stay in the kernel because the hardware was ubiquitous in late-2000s laptops that still turn up in working condition, and upstream is clearly still maintaining the code — bug fixes were posted to the linux-wireless list as recently as 2026. Intel itself ended support for these adapters back in 2013, so a note marking iwlegacy as a legacy-only driver would help readers understand it covers retired hardware and that newer Intel Wi-Fi cards use the separate iwlwifi driver instead.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Upstream still receives direct iwlegacy fixes in 2026; this patch updates 3945-mac allocation GFP handling.
- lore.kernel.org
A second 2026 iwlegacy 3945-mac fix shows current maintenance attention rather than abandonment/removal.
- intel.com
Intel lists both Intel WiFi Link 4965AGN and Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG as discontinued products, with self-service support dates of December 31, 2013.
- intel.com
Intel feature matrix still documents 4965AGN and 3945ABG as legacy adapter models; 3945ABG is only 802.11a/b/g and 4965AGN is an older 802.11n-era part.
- cateee.net
LKDDb maps CONFIG_IWL3945 to drivers/net/wireless/intel/iwlegacy and identifies the supported 3945ABG hardware/module.
- cateee.net
LKDDb maps CONFIG_IWL4965 to drivers/net/wireless/intel/iwlegacy and identifies the supported 4965AGN hardware/module.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local Kconfig read via shell confirmed iwlegacy is the in-tree driver family for Intel 3945ABG/4965AGN. lore_activity on drivers/net/wireless/intel/iwlegacy/3945-mac.c produced the cited March 2026 lore URLs, showing active bug-fix traffic and no evidence of an active removal series in the retrieved lore data; that backs off any deprecation/removal recommendation to keep-annotate. Web search found Intel's discontinued-products page and feature matrix, plus LKDDb pages for IWL3945/IWL4965. The hardware is long-EOL and unlikely to appear in new 2025 systems; remaining use is mostly legacy laptops/spares, so deployments are low. `iwlwifi` is the practical successor for newer Intel WLAN hardware, but not a drop-in software replacement for these exact chips.