Linux Removes Support for Legacy AppleTalk Protocol in Response to AI Patches

A surge of AI-generated patches in the Linux kernel has resulted in the removal of support for older protocols, the latest of which being AppleTalk. With the availability of AI tools, open source projects that accept outside patches have been dealing with a surge of reports, creating a lot of work for maintainers. Maintainers of open source projects such as curl have been speaking out about the deluge of "AI slop" bug reports. While organizations such as Mozilla have been able to make use of AI tools for finding and fixing bugs, in amateur hands, they can hallucinate and produce bogus bug reports and patches. The Linux kernel has been suffering just such a problem. Part of their strategy to reduce the load on developers has recently been to remove support for older drivers and other code in order to reduce the attack surface and reduce the burden on developers. Jakub Kicinski said in a pull request to remove some obsolete code: > Old code like amateur radio and NFC have long been a burden to core networking developers. syzbot loves to find bugs in BKL-era code, and noobs try to fix them. > Paolo says we spend ~40% of our time checking LLM outputs, sounds about right. He goes on to describe the code as "basically unused." Apparently, there had been multiple previous attempts to remove the code but someone wanted the code to stick around. > We've talked about these deletions multiple times in the past and every time someone wanted the code to stay. It is never very clear to me how many of those people actually use the code vs are just nostalgic to see it go. The removed code includes HAM radio support and some old legacy ATM protocols and drivers, among other things. The now-merged pull request equates to 138,161 lines of code removed. Now, AppleTalk is on the chopping block in another pull request from Jakub Kicinski. AppleTalk was introduced all the way back in 1985, and has since been discontinued by Apple in 2009, leaving it as a prime candidate for removal. > AppleTalk has been removed in MacOS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), in 2009, according to Wikipedia. We recently got a burst of AI generated fixes to this protocol which nobody is reviewing. > Let AppleTalk follow AX.25 and hamradio out of the Linux tree. We we [sic] will maintain the code at: github.com/linux-netdev/mod-orphan for anyone interested in playing with it. This PR adds up to a few thousand more lines of code. It's interesting to see how different projects adapt to the "LLM-pocalypse," removing support for ancient protocols seems like a smart move on multiple fronts.