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.

What's happened?

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.

GKH says that:

This is a very old driver, and no known hardware is still around for it, and the company says they do not need it anymore, so let's remove it as the LLMs are starting to poke at it and find "interesting" things which will just waste everyone's time given it's not actually used.

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."

Some context

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.

Nothing happened until May 2026, when a separate patchset reorganizing the tty subsystem's directory structure brought the topic back up. Crescent Hsieh from Moxa confirmed both the hardware and its software support were fully phased out and even offered to help write the removal patch himself.

That gap isn't unusual on its own; kernel patches sit in queues all the time. What's notable is what finally moved it (AI poking holes).

Where AI comes in

So saying that "AI is deleting kernel code" would be overstating what's actually happened. The Moxa folks had already signed off on removal in May. GKH didn't act until August, three months later.

What the AI did was start poking at 27-year-old code that everyone already agreed was dead, bringing up findings on hardware nobody has left to test against.

If you are used to working with AI agents, then you know that scanning old, unused code doesn't always produce genuinely new work. Sometimes it just produces enough annoyance that maintainers have to act to nip it in the bud.

This change landed minutes before GKH drew a different kind of line, rejecting LLM-generated patches for the kernel's staging tree entirely. So take note of this, while AI isn't writing much of the Linux kernel yet, it's already influencing which parts of it get tossed out.

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