Chelsio T5/T6 iSCSI Target Offload
Hardware-accelerated iSCSI target support for Chelsio's Terminator 5 and Terminator 6 Unified Wire network adapters, which are 10/25/40/100 Gbps Ethernet cards still sold today for high-throughput storage servers that want to offload iSCSI processing from the CPU onto the NIC.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting as a niche option, because the underlying Chelsio T6 adapters are still actively sold in 2025 with iSCSI offload as a marketed feature, yet upstream activity is thin: the last cxgbit-specific change was a vendor patch in 2021, and 2024 only brought it along for a treewide cleanup. Sites that don't need NIC-level offload can use the generic LIO iSCSI target (iscsi_target_mod) over any ordinary Ethernet card instead.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
cxgbit still received an upstream touch in late 2024, but as part of a broad target-core logging cleanup rather than cxgbit-specific feature work.
- lore.kernel.org
A vendor-authored cxgbit-specific functional change landed in 2021, indicating limited but real maintenance activity.
- chelsio.com
Chelsio's T62100-CR product page was live in 2026, shows 'BUY NOW', and advertises T6 Unified Wire adapters with iSCSI offload and T5 software continuity.
- chelsio.com
Chelsio's current Unified Wire adapter page still markets T6 adapters and lists iSCSI offload among active product features.
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows CONFIG_ISCSI_TARGET_CXGB4 / module cxgbit remains present in current kernel series, confirming the driver is still shipped upstream.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Keep, but annotate as niche. `exec_command` on local source found MODULE_DESCRIPTION 'Chelsio iSCSI target offload driver' plus T5/T6 references, tying cxgbit to Chelsio offload adapters. `lore_activity` on cxgbit_main.c showed only sparse recent traffic: 2024 treewide target cleanups and the last clearly cxgbit-specific change in 2021, with no removal discussion surfaced. `web.search` found Chelsio T6 adapter pages still live and marketed with iSCSI offload in 2026, so hardware is not obviously obsolete, but deployments are likely limited to legacy/specialized storage-offload environments. Natural non-offload replacement is the generic LIO iSCSI target stack via iscsi_target_mod over ordinary NICs.