Linux Finally Ends AppleTalk Protocol Support - Phoronix
Articles & Reviews
News Archive
Forums
Premium Ad-Free<br>Contact
Popular Categories
Close
Articles & Reviews
News Archive
Forums
Premium
Contact
Categories
Computers Display Drivers Graphics Cards Linux Gaming Memory Motherboards Processors Software Storage Operating Systems Peripherals
Linux Finally Ends AppleTalk Protocol Support
Written by Michael Larabel in Apple on 17 June 2026 at 05:40 AM EDT. 18 Comments
While the AppleTalk networking protocols were innovative when they first appeared for their plug-and-play capabilities, Apple itself ended their AppleTalk support back in 2009. Now 17 years later, the Linux kernel is ending AppleTalk support due to a recent surge of AI-generated patches.
Upstream Linux developers have decided to remove AppleTalk protocol support from the Linux kernel. All nearly 4k lines of kernel code were removed from the tree today for Linux 7.2. AppleTalk has been phased out for around two decades in favor of standard TCP/IP while some elements have lived on in the likes of Apple Bonjour. But due to a number of AI-generated patches around Linux's AppleTalk support recently flooding the mailing lists for this likely rarely-used to never-used protocol in modern times, it's been decided to now be a maintenance burden and thus the support is removed from the mainline kernel.
Jakub Kicinski wrote with the patch removing the AppleTalk support from the mainline Linux kernel:<br>"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 will maintain the code at: github.com/linux-netdev/mod-orphan for anyone interested in playing with it.
Retain the uAPI for now. No strong reason, simply because I suspect keeping it will be less controversial."
It was in the prior kernel cycle for Linux 7.1 that Linux also did away with ARCnet support for old ISA and PCMCIA hardware as well as removing ISDN, ham radio, and other old networking drivers all motivated for removal following the recent influx of patches due to AI / LLMs.
18 Comments
Tweet
macOS 27 Beta Breaks The Ability To Boot Asahi Linux<br>Linux 7.2 Will Be Able To Boot On Apple M3 Macs - But Far From Useful For End-Users<br>Apple M3 Support On Asahi Linux Is Approaching The Original Alpha Quality Of The M1<br>Linux 7.1 Lands The Apple SMC Power Driver For Reporting Battery Metrics On MacBooks<br>Apple HFS / HFS+ File-System Support Seeing Many Fixes For Linux 7.1<br>Patches Sent Out For Booting Linux On Apple M3 But Without Much Functionality
Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.
Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Affected Packages<br>ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Reaches The Milestone Of Being Able To Run Half-Life<br>macOS 27 Beta Breaks The Ability To Boot Asahi Linux<br>Arch Linux's AUR Sees More Than 400 Packages Compromised With Malware<br>Arch Linux AUR Hit By Another Wave Of Now More Sophisticated Malware Attack<br>Russian Spam & Profanities Are Now Plaguing The Arch Linux AUR<br>YSERVER: Modern X11 Server Written In Rust With The Help Of Claude Code<br>AMD Opens Pre-Orders For The Linux-Friendly Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform
Bcachefs Tools 1.38.6 Brings Many Performance Improvements
Linux 7.2 Slab Changes Include More Performance Optimizations
AMD's Lemonade AI Server Now Much More Useful With MCP Server Integration
Experimental, Reverse-Engineered & AI Assisted Rust Driver Targets Modern DisplayLink Hardware
Epic Games Announces Lore Open-Source Version Control System
Myna Announced As Speech-To-Text Solution For The Ubuntu Desktop
Initial AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL Support Successfully Merged For Linux 7.2
Qt Creator 20 IDE Released With AI Agent Support
GCC 17 Lands Initial Infrastructure For C++29
Linux Finally Ends AppleTalk Protocol Support
Mozilla Firefox Usage Of zlib-rs For Better Safety & Performance
Linux Enacts Guidance To Tighten Acceptance Of New File-Systems Into The Kernel
KDE Plasma 6 Desktop Finally Comes To Slackware
Btrfs Now Enables Large Folios By Default, Lands Huge Folios With Linux 7.2
Linux 7.2 Improves Anonymous/Unnamed Pipe Performance For Shell Pipelines & More
Phoronix Premium allows ad-free access to the site, multi-page articles on a single page, and other features while supporting this site's continued operations.
Intel Core Ultra X7 Panther Lake Performance On...