Intel 810/815 integrated graphics framebuffer
Framebuffer console support for the integrated graphics in Intel's 810 and 815 chipsets, the low-cost AGP-era northbridges that powered budget Socket 370 Pentium III and Celeron desktops from around 1999 through the early 2000s.
recommendation
A candidate for future removal because the hardware dates to 1999, Intel itself classifies it as legacy, and the driver only builds on 32-bit x86 systems with Intel AGP. It still receives occasional janitorial cleanups (a minor logging tweak landed in late 2025 and it was swept up in fbdev-wide refactoring in 2023), so it is not yet being actively retired, but new deployments have effectively vanished and the DRM i810 driver covers the same chips for anyone who still needs them.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The fbdev i810 driver still saw upstream maintenance in late 2025, but the visible work was minor logging cleanup rather than new hardware enablement.
- lore.kernel.org
Recent activity also includes fbdev-wide refactoring touching i810fb, indicating low-level maintenance rather than active product-driven development.
- cateee.net
CONFIG_FB_I810 is the Intel 810/815 framebuffer driver; it is limited to FB+PCI+X86_32+AGP_INTEL and remains present in current kernel heads.
- cateee.net
Mainline also carries a DRM_I810 driver for the same hardware family, making it the closest in-tree replacement path.
- en.wikipedia.org
Intel 810 was introduced in 1999 for low-cost Socket 370 systems, placing this hardware family firmly in the late-1990s/early-2000s legacy era.
- intel.com
Intel treats the 810 chipset graphics as legacy graphics hardware, consistent with no new-system sales in 2025.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Directory inspection via shell (`rg`, `sed`) confirmed a real PCI framebuffer driver for Intel 810/815. Upstream-attention evidence came from `mcp__lore_http__.lore_file_timeline`, which showed sparse recent touches and yielded the cited lore URLs; attempted broader lore subject/path scans timed out, so there is no positive evidence here of an active removal series. Deployment/obsolescence evidence came from `web.search_query`: LKDDb shows the driver is still buildable but constrained to 32-bit AGP-era systems, Wikipedia dates the chipset family to 1999-era PCs, Intel's support page classifies it as legacy graphics, and LKDDb's DRM_I810 page identifies the nearest in-tree replacement. Recommendation is `deprecate`: hardware is long obsolete and new deployments are effectively gone, but the driver still gets occasional maintenance so `remove` is not yet well-supported by the evidence.