Linux 6.13 Staging Clears Out 107k Lines Of Code From Old & Unmaintained Drivers

Greg Kroah-Hartman is out today with all of the pull requests for Linux 6.13 of the areas of the kernel he oversees. Most notable with the updates on the staging side are clearing out several drivers seeing no real code activity and no apparent users of the mainline Linux kernel... As such the staging pull lightens the kernel by around 107k lines of code.

Linux 6.13 is set to remove the five year old Fieldbus code with no one maintaining it and no one apparently running the mainline/upstream kernel on these Fieldbus-using industrial systems. Plus a number of other drivers stuck in staging and without anyone working to improve them to enhance the quality of the code so that they can be promoted outside of the "staging" testing grounds area of the kernel.

So the staging code being removed with Linux 6.13 includes fieldbus, gdm724x, olpc_dcon, rtl8712, rts5208, vt6655, and vt6656 drivers. If there are any genuine users of these drivers remaining that are still running an upstream kernel, the drivers can always be reverted / merged back but otherwise they are gone without anyone maintaining them.

Today's staging pull as a result comes in at 42,011 insertions and 107,756 deletions for lines.

As for the new code in staging with Linux 6.13, there is the introduction of the GPIB driver subsystem. The GPIB driver subsystem is for "really old and semi-old interfaces to lab equipments." Let's hope that GPIB work continues to happen and the code further cleaned up for the aging lab equipment. GPIB is short for the General Purpose Interface Bus and is a digital interface between computers/devices and lab instruments.

See the staging pull request for the long list of patches this cycle from removing the old/unmaintained code to lots of tiny clean-ups and all this new GPIB code.