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:

"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.