Adaptec AACRAID Series 6/7/8 SCSI RAID controllers
A family of PCI/PCIe hardware RAID host bus adapters sold by Adaptec (later PMC-Sierra and Microchip) and rebadged by Dell, HP, IBM, and ICP, covering Adaptec AAC products and the Series 6, 7, and 8 generations widely deployed in servers from the mid-2000s through the late 2010s.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting as legacy because the hardware stopped being sold new around 2020, when Microchip steered customers toward its newer SmartRAID 3100/3200 line handled by the smartpqi driver. The installed base is still large enough that Microchip and Red Hat were sending real bug fixes upstream as recently as late 2025, so removal would hurt real users; new deployments, however, should expect to land on smartpqi instead.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
aacraid still receives substantive upstream fixes in 2025, with review/testing from Microchip and Red Hat, indicating an active but niche installed base rather than abandonment.
- lore.kernel.org
aacraid had direct functional bug-fix traffic in late 2025, not just treewide churn.
- microchip.com
Microchip positioned SmartRAID 3100E as a migration path from older Adaptec Series 8E hardware in 2020, showing the aacraid-era product line had already become legacy by then.
- microchip.com
Microchip's current Adaptec RAID product page markets SmartRAID 3100/3200 families, not the older Series 6/7/8 generation handled by aacraid.
- docs.kernel.org
The upstream smartpqi driver covers newer Microchip/Adaptec Smart Storage RAID controllers, making it the natural replacement path for new deployments.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local tree inspection via exec_command (`rg`/`sed`) shows `SCSI_AACRAID` is a real PCI SCSI RAID driver and names Adaptec/Dell/HP/IBM/ICP products; `linit.c` enumerates older Adaptec AAC and PMC Series 6/7/8 devices. Lore evidence was obtained with `lore_activity` on `drivers/scsi/aacraid/linit.c`; it shows ongoing 2025-2026 bug-fix/API-adaptation traffic, so removal is not justified. Web search obtained the two Microchip URLs showing current SmartRAID offerings and the 2020 migration statement from Series 8E; together these indicate the hardware family behind aacraid is legacy and unlikely to be sold new in 2025. `https://docs.kernel.org/scsi/smartpqi.html` is a canonical recall URL for the upstream replacement family used by newer Adaptec/Microchip Smart Storage products. Net: keep the driver, but annotate it as legacy/maintenance-mode rather than deprecating or removing it.