If the transition from Windows 10 to 11 has taught us anything, it’s that companies are starting to add restrictions to older versions of hardware on which their software can run. Your PC may have the processing power to handle Windows 11, but unless your CPU has TPM 2.0, Microsoft deems Windows 11 worthless.

Fortunately, there’s always Linux for those who don’t want to throw away perfectly good hardware. And if you want proof that Team Tux treats older devices with love and care, check out our notes on a possible Linux 7.0 commit. This includes cleaning up drivers that appeared on Linux almost a decade ago.

Work underway to clean up 9-year-old drivers on Linux 7.0

Because working hardware shouldn’t be left behind

as discovered by phoronicswe see a ton of updates waiting to be part of Linux 7.0. we see everything from A new way to repair file systems on the fly to Rock Band 4 controller support. Now, a new update has been added to the queue that has caught the attention of Linus and may be included in 7.0.

This is a large set of staging driver updates for 7.0-rc1. Well, nothing too major, just a bunch of small coding style cleanups, mostly within one driver. For some reason everyone seems to be paying attention to it, but I just can’t get it (are there any tutorials out there showing this to people?)

Overall, not much has changed, but the changes can be summarized as follows:

– rtl8723bs driver cleanup, lots of cleanup…

– Clean up the vme_user driver

– sm750fb driver cleanup

– Cleanup of small gray bus driver

– Other very minor staging driver cleanups.

See notes about RTL8723BS, which has undergone “a lot of cleanup.” This driver powers a chip released in 2014 that powers devices such as the Intel Compute Stick. The driver itself didn’t appear on Linux until 2017, but since then it’s been continually refined to work properly with the kernel. This shows that the use of the hardware is limited only to its physical lifespan, as long as there are people who continue to support it.