{"id":234871,"date":"2026-04-23T16:18:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T20:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/23\/linux-7-1-removes-some-obsolete-pcmcia-drivers-that-likely-havent-been-used-in-years\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T17:05:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T21:05:07","slug":"linux-7-1-removes-some-obsolete-pcmcia-drivers-that-likely-havent-been-used-in-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/23\/linux-7-1-removes-some-obsolete-pcmcia-drivers-that-likely-havent-been-used-in-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Linux 7.1 Removes Some Obsolete PCMCIA Drivers That Likely Haven’t Been Used In Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linux 7.1 Removes Some Obsolete PCMCIA Drivers That Likely Haven’t Been Used In Years<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.phoronix.com\/news\/Linux-7.1-Drops-Old-PCMCIA-Code<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-04-23 16:18:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.phoronix.com<\/a><\/p>\n

In addition to some network drivers on the chopping block due to AI bug reports for obsolete hardware\/drivers and Linux 7.1 dropping various drivers for Russia’s Baikal CPUs, the Linux 7.1 kernel as of today also dropped some obsolete PCMCIA host controller drivers.<\/p>\n

For years there have been efforts to remove obsolete PCMCIA WiFi cards, PCMCIA to USB drivers, and other steps to phase out obsolete PCMCIA card support. For Linux 7.1, it’s a few obsolete host controller drivers being removed that are likely unused by anyone running a modern, upstream Linux kernel and the drivers themselves are not maintained. Some of these drivers have been broken in the past for years at a time.\n<\/p>\n

Ethan Nelson-Moore took to removing the I82092, I82365, and TCIC drivers. The I82092 was for an Intel PCI-to-PCMCIA bridge device found in some ancient laptops and evaluation boards, the I82365 for an ISA-bus PCMCIA host bridge for even older hardware, and then the Databook TCIC family of PCMCIA host bridges.
\n<\/p>\n

\"PCMCIA<\/p>\n

Ethan argued in the patch removing these PCMCIA host controller drivers:
\n
“PCMCIA is almost completely obsolete (the last computers supporting it natively were from ~2009), and the general consensus seems to be that support for it should be gradually removed from the kernel.<\/p>\n

In 2023, an initial step of removing all the PCMCIA char drivers was taken in commit 9b12f050c76f (“char: pcmcia: remove all the drivers”), and that has not been reverted, so it seems logical to continue this process by removing more low-hanging fruit.\n<\/p>\n

These host controller drivers have had no meaningful changes since their status was discussed in 2022, and are unlikely to have any
\n
remaining users. Remove them and a couple references to them in comments.\n<\/p>\n

The i82365 and tcic drivers are for ISA-attached host controllers, which are even less likely to be used nowadays than ones on other buses.\n<\/p>\n

The i82092 driver has almost certainly not been used in over 20 years. It was broken by a null pointer dereference since…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Linux 7.1 Removes Some Obsolete PCMCIA Drivers That Likely Haven’t Been Used In Years https:\/\/www.phoronix.com\/news\/Linux-7.1-Drops-Old-PCMCIA-Code…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":234872,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.phoronix.net\/image.php?id=231&image=netgear_wg511t_installed","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[71],"class_list":["post-234871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-linux","tag-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234871"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234871"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":234873,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234871\/revisions\/234873"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}