The char/misc changes were merged this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. While there is a lot of IIO driver churn as usual and updates to the likes of the Google Binder drivers, there continues to be the 2026 trend of removing old hardware drivers that are rarely updated these days and likely have no active users left on the mainline Linux kernel. This trend is further pushed along by the surplus of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches these days causing additional maintenance burden for these obsolete drivers.

A few weeks back I wrote about old SGI drivers set for removal and that indeed took place for Linux 7.3. These old Silicon Graphics drivers are not only likely unused by anyone on a modern 2026+ kernel but also proved to be rather insecure. These SGI XP and GRU drivers pertain to SGI hardware from more than one decade ago with the Global Reference Unit hardware resource. Getting rid of these drivers now eliminates the insecure code and further reducing the maintenance burden.

There is also an IBM driver being removed in Linux 7.3. The IBMASM driver is for the IBM Remote Supervisor Adapter (RSA) and RSA II out-of-band management PCI and ISA cards. These pre-BMC solutions were used in the early 2000s on IBM eServer xSeries servers. The IBM Remote Supervisor Adapter hasn't been used in any IBM/Lenovo servers in more than a decade and a half and are old mostly 32-bit relics at this point. Any remaining IBM eServer xSeries hardware is likely not running a modern Linux OS stack, so the driver is being cleared away for 2.6k less lines of code.

Those obsolete driver removals are the main highlights of the char/misc pull request for Linux 7.3.