Linux 7.2 Kernel to Drop AppleTalk Support as It Holds No Practical Value

AppleTalk was an early Macintosh local network protocol prized for its plug‑and‑play capabilities and used for file and printer sharing; it resembled Novell IPX and was supported on all Mac OS releases from System 7.5 (1994) until the shift to full IP networking with Mac OS X (2001). Apple discontinued AppleTalk support in macOS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in 2009.

In recent months a flood of AI‑generated patches targeting the AppleTalk code appeared on the Linux kernel mailing list. Because the protocol sees little or no real‑world usage today, maintaining its code has become a burden, prompting the kernel community to deem the support practically valueless.

On June 18, upstream developers removed roughly 4,000 lines of AppleTalk‑related code from the Linux 7.2 tree, replacing it with standard TCP/IP handling; only small remnants survive in protocols such as Apple Bonjour.

According to the maintainer, "We recently received several AI‑generated fixes for AppleTalk, but no one reviewed them. Let’s remove AppleTalk from the Linux codebase just like AX.25 and amateur‑radio. We will keep the uAPI for compatibility, but there is no strong reason to retain the rest." – Jakub Kicinski

The removal is part of a broader cleanup that also eliminated legacy drivers for ISA, PCMCIA ARCnet, ISDN, amateur‑radio, and other old network hardware in the previous 7.1 development cycle, all driven by the same influx of AI/LLM patches.