// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Nobody Touched This Linux Driver for Years, Until AI Started Poking Around and It Got Removed
Greg Kroah-Hartman just deleted a Linux driver that hasn't mattered to anyone in years.
The reason for removal wasn't a bug report or a user complaint. It was AI agents poking around dead code and turning up findings nobody asked for.
That sounds like another "AI is reshaping open source" piece. It mostly isn't. This driver was already on its way out, Moxa said so years ago. What changed is the removal finally happening at a time when AI is scraping away at the kernel codebase.
On August 3, GKH sent a patch to the linux-serial mailing list removing drivers/tty/moxa.c entirely. That's the Moxa Intellio family multiport serial driver, code that's been part of the kernel since 1999.
The patch strips out 2,137 lines of driver code, plus the Kconfig and Makefile entries that reference it. In total, 2,148 lines of unused code are gone.
While keeping the door open for anyone who actually still needs it, noting that the driver could return down the line, just built "in a more 'modern' way."
Moxa isn't some obscure or defunct outfit that used to be cool back in the 90s. It's a Taiwanese company that makes industrial networking gear and serial cards for factories and railway systems.
The Intellio series was an older PCI serial card lineup from their catalog, not a piece of consumer hardware you'd find lying around in people's attics.
While software support was promised through 2023, the hardware itself was discontinued way back in 2017. According to an email Moxa's Ray Chen sent Jiri Slaby back in 2021, the company had no plans to keep the Intellio line alive any longer.
Jiri, who has maintained parts of the kernel's serial driver code for years, floated marking moxa.c as broken or dropping it outright.