Hello Jakub, On Mon, 2026-06-15 at 15:29 -0700, Jakub Kicinski wrote: > This tiny series moves appletalk out of tree, to: > > https://github.com/linux-netdev/mod-orphan > > Core maintainainers are unable to keep up with the rate of security > bug reports and fixes. Nobody seems to care about appletalk enough > to review the patches.
Why would fixing these vulnerabilities be relevant? No one is going to expose an Apple Talk server to an untrusted network, are they? The same applies to hamradio and AX.25, they are all used by hobbyists in DMZ networks, so no one really cares about vulnerabilities in these protocols. I find it sad that AI tools are basically used to shoot at the kernel to kill off features as some people are apparently getting scared by these AI reports and just nuke everything in a panic reaction as if it wouldn't just be possible to disable these protocols at compile time to reduce the attack surface. > As Eric pointed out Mac OS dropped AppleTalk over a decade ago. That's not the point though. No one is going to use AppleTalk to network a Linux box to a modern macOS machine. The usefulness lies in hooking up a Linux box to a vintage Mac or other retro computer. So far, one of the huge advantages of open source operating systems has always been that even niche use cases were supported and people could make use of old hardware by using open source operating systems over commercial offerings such as Windows or macOS. With the advent of AI security reports, these niche use cases are more and more being killed off with the argument that a vulnerability in the harmradio code could pose a threat to a large SAP database running on a Linux enterprise distribution. However, if your enterprise distribution is enabling kernel features their customers aren't using and therefore enlarging the attack surface, it's more a problem of said enterprise distribution and not of these old and obscure network protocols. I am trying my best to save as many classic features in the kernel as possible to enable retro computing but I am sometimes fearing that commercial interest in the kernel is taking over too much making my efforts harder every day. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
