Linux May Drop Old Network Drivers Now That AI-Driven Bug Reports Are Causing A Burden

28 points by WilhelmVonWeiner 18 hours ago on lobsters | 21 comments

Old network maintenance drivers are becoming a maintenance burden in the era of fuzzing and predominantly AI-driven bug detection causing an uptick in possible bug/security reports to upstream Linux kernel developers but with these drivers potentially having no actual users.

Linux is well known for maintaining old hardware support where it makes sense and doesn't pose a maintenance burden to the Linux kernel developers and they maintain some interest/support. But with AI-generated bug reports as well as fuzzing at large uncovering more code defects, Linux kernel developers either can ignore the AI-driven reporting or begin removing old drivers to avoid the excess reports for drivers where there are likely few to no one using an upstream kernel on old computer hardware relics.

Andrew Lunn sent out a patch series today to begin removing a number of ISA and PCMCIA era network drivers from the Linux kernel. He elaborates on the recent maintenance burden coming about due to AI/fuzzing:

"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.
These are all ISA and PCMCIA Ethernet devices, mostly from the last century, a couple from 2001 or 2002. It seems unlikely they are still used. However, remove them one patch at a time so they can be brought back if somebody still has the hardware, runs modern kernels and wants to take up the roll of driver Maintainer."

This patch series drops old 3com, AMD, SMSC, Cirrus, Fujitsu, Xircom, and 8390 Ethernet drivers. In turn lightening the kernel by 27.6k lines of code -- and 27.6k less lines for AI coding agents to concern themselves with for no real benefit.

It will be interesting to see if other Linux kernel subsystems also begin removing their old drivers as well to avoid the influx of AI reporting.