Linux Might Drop Fieldbus Support For Industrial Systems With No One Maintaining It

Merged back in 2019 was the Fieldbus system for connecting different systems/components/instruments within industrial environments. Five years later the code isn't being well maintained and looks like it will be on its way out the door if no one steps up to better maintain this driver support for industrial systems for process automation.

Similar to other old and unmaintained staging drivers set for removal with the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle, the Fieldbus code is the latest on the chopping block. Fieldbus entered the staging area back in 2019 but since then activity around Fieldbus has waned. Fieldbus is an industry standard for a serial bus system used to exchange data between different system components and able to withstand long distances and high external load.

Philipp Hortmann noted in the request for comments to remove the code that there have just been 11 patches to Fieldbus in the last three years -- some of which were just maintenance changes for jiving with the rest of the Linux kernel code such as around deprecated functions. The maintainer of the Fieldbus code also hasn't provided a "reviewed-by" for any patches since May of 2021. It's also not clear that anyone is actually using Fieldbus on the latest upstream Linux kernel versions.

So as a result of the code being dormant, the mailing list proposal is to remove Fieldbus from the mainline kernel if no one steps up. If anyone is actually using Fieldbus, they can stick to using current Linux LTS versions -- after all, the LTS kernels are more likely to be used within industrial systems.