Post #1843413

2026-04-24 11:49 UTC

This is so funny: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Old-Network-AI So, Linux drops support for many old network drivers from ISA and PCMCIA era, and the reason is AI. Andrew Lunn says: &quot;These old drivers have not been much of a Maintenance burden until recently. Now there are more newbies using AI and fuzzers finding issues, resulting in more work for Maintainers. Fixing these old drivers make little sense, if it is not clear they have users.&quot; Basically, maintainers are tired of a flood of annoying mails about vulnerabilities in old drivers (who knows how many of them are false positives), so it&#39;s easier to just drop support altogether. AI was supposed to make everyone&#39;s life easier, right? =)

Replies (3)

@evgandr@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-04-25 09:07

@chesheer Ohhh :drgn_cry: , thats why I bet on #NetBSD for daily computing — any "newbie with AI" touching CVS — will be shot with heavy low-orbital ion cannon (I hope) :runbsd:

Open ##2138130
@TomAoki@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-04-25 16:03

@chesheer There had been several discussions for dropping old hardwares on #FreeBSD official MLs (of course about FreeBSD!), not limited with network hardwares. Usually, heads ups are posted at any of (or all of) freebsd-current, freebsd-hackers and/or freebsd-arch ML, then, if sufficient numbers of users who still want the driver kept states "hey, I'm still using it!", it may be kept, otherwise, dropped. So subscribing to any of these (freebsd-current would be preferred for non-developers) MLs is strongly encouraged for anyone understanding "I'm still using hardwares that are already no longer manuactured" not to miss the heads ups. Some causes long discussions. But this is quite sane way, I believe. This is because FreeBSD project doesn't have any "specific single person" (like Linus on Linux) authorized to decide everything the person wants. This kind of discussions are usually held when the driver is "actually" being "removed" from source tree. Some (in case it's possible) would be silently dropped from generic (default) kernel but kept as kernel modules. Kernel modules that devd / devmatch / devfs mechanisms can recognize the hardware and load appropreate modules automatically are still "mostly" like in generic kernel. But if any of the modules is considered vulnerable and no one can fix (as no devs has the hardware to test), it should be blocklisted not to be loaded by default (would need discussions).

Open ##2138134
@jamn@kolektiva.social 2026-04-25 19:33

@chesheer it would be funny if it wasn't sad

Open ##2138135