Cisco UCS VIC Fibre Channel over Ethernet HBAs
Cisco's Unified Computing System Virtual Interface Card adapters (the VIC 1400/14000 series and predecessors) when presented as Fibre Channel over Ethernet host bus adapters. They sit in Cisco UCS blade and rack servers in enterprise data centers, letting a single converged network card carry both Ethernet traffic and Fibre Channel storage traffic to SAN arrays.
recommendation
It should stay because Cisco still ships these VIC adapters as current products in 2025 and the driver is being actively maintained upstream, with substantive patches landing on linux-scsi from both Cisco engineers and the wider community as recently as 2025 and into 2026. Deployments are niche compared to mainstream storage hardware, but UCS environments are common enough in enterprise data centers that there is no in-tree replacement and removing it would strand real customers.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
linux-scsi saw non-treewide fnic maintenance in late 2025 (e.g. interrupt-mode configurability patch series), indicating active upstream support.
- lore.kernel.org
fnic received further functional work in 2026 (mempool use for receive frames), which argues against deprecation/removal.
- cisco.com
Cisco's UCS VIC 1400/14000 Series datasheet lists VIC 1455/1457/1467/1495 adapters as supporting Ethernet or FCoE and presenting NICs or HBAs, showing the hardware class remained a current product family into 2025.
- cateee.net
LKDDB identifies CONFIG_FCOE_FNIC as the Cisco FNIC driver for Cisco PCI-Express FCoE HBA hardware, including Cisco VIC FCoE HBA PCI ID 1137:0045.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
`drivers/scsi/fnic` is a real hardware driver for Cisco VIC FCoE HBAs/CNAs. `lore_file_timeline` on `drivers/scsi/fnic/fnic_main.c` showed sustained activity with substantive linux-scsi patches in 2025 and 2026, so this is not dormant code. Cisco product-page evidence obtained via `web.search_query` shows FCoE-capable UCS VIC adapters still marketed around 2025, but this is a niche enterprise storage-network deployment rather than mass-market hardware, so deployments are `low` not `none`. LKDDB URL was also obtained via `web.search_query` and ties the driver to Cisco VIC FCoE HBA devices. I found no evidence of an active upstream removal push within the time budget; there is also no like-for-like in-tree replacement driver for Cisco VIC FCoE HBA support, so the recommendation is to keep it.