Bug 198657

Summary:	irda scheduled for removal
Product:	Networking	Reporter:	Christopher Schramm (kernel)
Component:	Other	Assignee:	Stephen Hemminger (stephen)
Status:	NEW ---
Severity:	normal
Priority:	P1
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Kernel Version:	4.14	Subsystem:
Regression:	No	Bisected commit-id:

Description Christopher Schramm 2018-02-03 20:24:46 UTC

Hi,

I just wanted to do my regular download from my dive computer, plugged in my USB IrDA dongle, ran irattach, hit the download button in surbsurface and got an error message. It turns out that my system does not support AF_IRDA anymore after upgrading to Linux 4.14 as the Linux developers scheduled the subsystem for removal and the Debian maintainers decided to disable it already due to that.

It seems like I am not the only one surprised by the statement that nobody seems to use it and it's broken: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/29/773

libdivecomputer does use it [1] and I do use it via libdivecomputer. It works fine. While I agree that IrDA isn't the best decision today, my dive computer is neither exotic nor very old.

[1] https://github.com/libdivecomputer/libdivecomputer/blob/master/src/irda.c

I ask you to reconsider the decision to drop the irda subsystem.

Regards

Comment 1 Stephen Hemminger 2018-02-03 20:40:32 UTC

The issue is that unmaintained subsystems are becoming increasing vulnerable to security scans. Many of these tools find buts that no one has time, resources, or even the hardware to fix.

if you want to take over maintaining IRDA either out of tree or as maintainer, then community would be happy to have someone do it.

Comment 2 Christopher Schramm 2018-02-03 21:35:48 UTC

Not the response I hoped for, but I'm going to consider your suggestion (out of tree). Are there any concrete examples for such unfixed (security) issues? What was the specific trigger for the move?