On top of various other Linux drivers for old hardware being removed due to noise generated by AI/LLM coding agents, there are more examples coming with Linux 7.3 as some old Silicon Graphics (SGI) drivers are being removed from the mainline Linux kernel over security concerns.

HPE engineer Dimitri Sivanich authored a patch to remove the SGI GRU driver, which is for the Global Reference Unit (GRU) hardware resource located on the system chipset for memory that can be mmap'ed from user-space. The patch simply noted that the driver has become a security concern and isn't used by anything newer than the SGI UV2 series. The SGI UltraViolet 2 released back in 2012. Removing the SGI GRU driver code is 6.8k lines of code.

"Due to security concerns, remove the SGI GRU driver, which cannot be used on anything newer than the long time unsupported UV2 platform."

In turn the SGI XP drivers are also being removed as they depend upon the GRU driver to function. The SGI XP drivers are for communication between SGI SSIs.

"Working XP drivers require the GRU driver. The GRU driver is being removed, so remove XP as well."

The specific security concerns weren't elaborated on for these SGI drivers. This even comes amid recent patches looking to address broken functionality with the GRU driver but instead HPE opting to remove the drivers instead.