MediaTek Filogic MT7996/MT7992/MT7990 Wi-Fi 7 chipsets
MediaTek's Filogic family of Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) PCIe radio chips, including the MT7996, MT7992, and MT7990, used in current-generation consumer, enterprise, and ISP-supplied routers and access points shipping from roughly 2023 onward.
recommendation
It should stay in the kernel because this is active, current Wi-Fi 7 silicon that MediaTek still markets and ships in new routers and access points in 2025, and the code itself is under heavy ongoing development with hundreds of commits in recent years and fixes landing as recently as early 2026. There is no successor driver and no sign of removal discussions upstream.
repository signals
sources
- git.kernel.org
Upstream activity is current and substantial; the mt7996 directory continues to receive fixes and feature work rather than removal-oriented churn.
- git.kernel.org
The driver is a real PCI wireless driver and its PCI ID table covers MT7996, MT7992, and MT7990 devices.
- mediatek.com
MediaTek still markets its Filogic Wi-Fi 7 family for current consumer, enterprise, broadband, and retail deployments.
- git01.mediatek.com
MediaTek's OpenWrt feed still lists Filogic880/MT7996 and Filogic860/MT7992 as supported Wi-Fi 7 chipsets, indicating ongoing product and software enablement.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Keep. Static data already shows 388 substantive commits in 5y with a latest touch on 2026-03-03, which is incompatible with deprecation/removal. I verified live local churn with shell `git -c safe.directory=... log --since=2025-01-01 -- .../mt7996`, which returned many recent mt7996 fixes. I verified hardware scope with shell `sed` on `mt7996/pci.c`, which shows MT7996/MT7992/MT7990 PCI IDs. `lei` was unavailable, so I could not directly query lore; no removal discussion evidence surfaced from available signals, and web search did not surface lore removal threads. Kernel.org URLs are canonical recall, corroborated by those shell reads. MediaTek Wi-Fi 7 and MediaTek OpenWrt feed URLs were obtained via web search. This is current Wi-Fi 7 hardware still sold into new router/AP deployments in 2025+, so there is no natural replacement driver and no deprecation basis.