Re: [PATCH net-next 0/2] appletalk: move the protocol out of tree

[Carsten Strotmann <carsten@strotmann.de>]

Hi Jakub,

On Tuesday 16 June 2026 05:49:01 PM (+02:00), Jakub Kicinski wrote:

 > > the solution, as Adrian pointed out, is to leave these features in
 > > the Linux kernel but have them disabled by default.
 > 
 > I think y'all need to internalize that "just leave it in" means work.
 > _Someone_ has to handle the reports and patches. And since nobody is
 > doing that the code is going to GitHub, where it can continue to "just
 > be left" or whatever, without racking up CVEs for the Linux kernel
 > and leading to maintainer burn out :/
 > 

That's a good point. The large influx of reports is a problem, 
and burn out of maintainers is a too high cost.

 > > Maybe put a warning message in the kernel config tools that people
 > > should only enable these if they know what they are doing.
 > > 
 > > These "retro"-features should not pose any security risk of they are
 > > not compiled into a kernel.
 > 
 > Nobody is stopping you from using this code! It's perfectly suitable 
 > to be an out of tree module. Maybe it'd be harder if someone wanted to
 > remove a CPU architecture you want to use, but protocols are perfectly
 > fine as loadable modules. You can continue to use the code from:
 >  https://github.com/linux-netdev/mod-orphan
 > 
 > Presumably you could get Debian to package that and you wouldn't even
 > know the sources no longer live in the kernel tree.
 > 

It seems the current situation is the price of success (of Linux, which is 
good).

I guess the way to go would be to move these old drivers to userspace in 
order to 
reduce dependencies on the Linux Kernel. But that is not a task for the 
Linux-Maintainers, but for the Retro-Community.

Thanks for your work and the background information

Carsten

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