While it has been nearly seven years since Apple acquired the Intel Mobile Communications' smartphone modem business and fifteen years since Intel acquired the wireless solutions division of Infineon, in 2026 we might see mainline Linux kernel support for the out-of-date XMM6260 modem.

The Intel XMM6260 W-CDMA slim modem launched back in 2011 during the 40nm days and was promoted for 3G smartphones with "true 21 Mbps downlink performance". It's woefully outdated in 2026 but surprisingly patches were recently posted in trying to provide mainline kernel support for the Intel XMM 6260 modem.

[1]This patch series last week seeks to add support for the XMM 6260 modem to the mainline Linux kernel. This includes a baseband-xmm6260 USB driver as well as some Tegra PHY driver adjustments with the testing being done from a LG Optimus Vu (P895) "phablet" smartphone from 2012 that is powered by the Tegra 3 SoC.

Some pointers have been raised in this nearly 700 lines of new code patch series so at least another revision is expected before potentially seeing mainline Linux kernel support for this fifteen year old 3G modem. We'll see if it manages to cross the finish line of the mainline Linux kernel source tree in 2026.



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20260511135703.62470-1-clamor95@gmail.com/