Linus Torvalds has included a set of patches with changes to the networking subsystem in the Linux 7.2 kernel, which is expected to be released in mid-August. The cleanup of the kernel from outdated drivers and subsystems continues. The most significant change is the removal of the AppleTalk protocol stack implementation from the kernel. AppleTalk was used in Apple computers since 1985 and was replaced by TCP/IP in the 1990s. Support for AppleTalk was discontinued by Apple with the release of Mac OS X 10.6 'Snow Leopard' in 2009.
The reason for the removal is cited as the presence of unresolved bugs in the AppleTalk implementation. Developers received a series of patches prepared with the help of AI assistants, but there is no one to review them, as the subsystem has been left without maintainers. For those who may need the code of the modules removed from the kernel, the implementations of AppleTalk, ATM, AX.25, ISDN, and hamradio have been moved to a separate repository on GitHub.
In addition to AppleTalk, components of the ATM data transmission technology not related to PPPoATM, as well as code for integrating TLS with sockmap and supporting frequency ranges of 5/10 MHz in the wireless cfg80211/mac80211 stack, have also been removed from the codebase of kernel 7.2. Due to insurmountable locking issues and the lack of maintainers, a specific implementation for accelerating TLS processing using TCP Offload Engine has been removed (a more common TLS offload implementation has been retained). The code for compatibility with 32-bit x_tables on 64-bit systems has been disabled and is scheduled for removal.
Allikas: opennet.ru
