• oh, duh, how could I forget about my applicon™ PCI2000PFB fieldbus network interface card. I use it every single day!

  • PROFIBUS is the Process Field Bus as a digital communication protocol commonly used for industrial automation. […] This driver hasn’t seen much activity since the Linux 2.1~2.2 days.

    This is probably still uses somewhere. Industrial systems have longer lifetime than personal computers.

    Those systems probably use older kernels, and vendors can volonteer if they want to maintain the driver. If no vendor do, then removing the driver seems reasonable.