Cavium Octeon's Ethernet Driver Being Booted From Linux 5.6
The Octeon Ethernet networking driver has been part of the mainline kernel for a decade but within the "staging" area of the kernel where immature / WIP kernel code is nursed along. But with this driver being stagnate now for several years without any real effort to get it cleaned up, Linux kernel staging maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman is dropping it from the kernel.
Greg already removed it in staging-next ahead of Linux 5.6. Dropping the driver lightens the kernel by almost five thousand lines of code.
In the commit Greg commented, "This driver has been in the tree since 2009 with no real movement to get it out. Now it is starting to cause build issues and other problems for people who want to fix coding style problems, but can not actually build it. As nothing is happening here, just delete the module entirely."
Cavium Octeon MIPS CN3XXX/CN5XXX users will be left to either using the driver out-of-tree, sticking to an older kernel, or the likely scenario that work on the code is revived.
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