Don’t want to be harassed by AI anymore: Linux kernel deletes 27-year-old driver

Kuai Technology reported on August 6 that today’s AI technology has greatly simplified the process of writing code, which is convenient for programmers, but it also hinders some programmers. The Linux kernel had to delete a device driver from 27 years ago. Recently, Linux community administrator Greg Kroah-Hartman decided to delete some driver codes under linux-serial, mainly involving C218 Turbo PCI, C320 Turbo PCI and CP-204J devices. These products of Moxa, an industrial equipment company in Taiwan, started in 1999, 27 years ago. These drivers are so old that they are no longer necessary. It is not even possible to confirm that these hardware still exist. The manufacturer Moxa also stated that these codes are no longer needed. There are a total of 2148 lines of code, and deleting them will have no impact. But the reason that prompted administrators to delete these codes was not just that the code was useless, but the trouble of being harassed by AI. Now programmers no longer find bugs themselves, but instead use AI large models to find bugs or security vulnerabilities. These ancient codes are scanned by AI over and over again, and error reports are constantly submitted, which annoys the Linux community because they don’t have the resources to verify them. Greg Kroah-Hartman said that even with the best current large-scale AI models, 1/3 of the security issues discovered are completely wrong or even harmful. Several developers have already mentioned similar issues. AI large model scanning has discovered so-called bugs or security holes in the Linux kernel. However, in order to verify whether there is really a problem, developers have to spend a lot of time and energy to verify. Linus, the leader of the Linux community, is not opposed to using AI to submit patches. However, on the one hand, AI has greatly improved development efficiency, but on the other hand, it also causes a lot of trouble, especially when it comes to submitting bugs and vulnerabilities. It is also for this reason that in April, the Linux 7.1 kernel deleted more than 138,000 lines of obsolete code.