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
--
https://strotmann.de
