Linux kernel drops AppleTalk networking

[NJRoadfan]

Linux Finally Ends AppleTalk Protocol Support - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

Thanks AI....

Can't say I'm surprised given the slop of AI bug reports flooding everything. Overall it seems to be driving maintainers of open source software to the point of quitting at an alarming rate. Hopefully it won't be too hard to compile out-of-tree or be replaced with something user space. Really puts a damper on work I did for Netatalk and A2SERVER.

 

[PL212]

Ugh, that's annoying! Well, rest assured there are lots of us that appreciate your work reanimating DDP on modern Netatalk...

 

[thecloud]

You can still run a VM with a version of Linux (or NetBSD, etc.) that has AppleTalk support, even on a host system that doesn't have AppleTalk, as long as you use a bridged network interface. Honestly, I think this was the inevitable result of the decision Avie Tevanian made over 20 years ago to kill AppleTalk on OS X. It made the decision to remove it from Linux a no-brainer when they were faced with having to actually maintain it.

 

[macoslove]

What is the negative about keeping it? Does it cause issues or is it just 'old'?

 

[thecloud]

What is the negative about keeping it? Does it cause issues or is it just 'old'?

Some folks reported bugs with uninitialized variables, time-of-check/time-of-use races, and use-after-free issues in the AppleTalk code. These are generally considered security issues. The core Linux maintainer responsible for this code apparently was unable to get anyone to review the patches, since his commit message for the change was, "Core maintainainers [sic] are unable to keep up with the rate of security bug reports and fixes. Nobody seems to care about appletalk enough to review the patches. As Eric pointed out Mac OS dropped AppleTalk over a decade ago."

It didn't seem that there were a lot of issues reported in the appletalk stack itself, but the cumulative weight of all the incoming bugs in other areas likely led to the decision.

Merge branch 'appletalk-move-the-protocol-out-of-tree' · torvalds/linux@8940a82

Jakub Kicinski says: ==================== appletalk: move the protocol out of tree This tiny series moves appletalk out of tree, to: https://github.com/linux-netdev/mod-orphan Core maintainai...

github.com

appletalk - search results

 

[NJRoadfan]

Here is the patch that "broke the camel's back": https://patchew.org/linux/[email protected]/