Linux Kernel is Getting Ready to Purge 55,00 Lines of Old 32-bit Arm Platform Code
A few days ago, thirteen patches were sent to the kernel mailing lists that are looking to delete some of the 32-bit Arm platform code that the upcoming Linux 7.3 release cycle has marked as deprecated.
While none of them have been merged yet, Arnd Bergmann, who has been trying to retire this code for years now, has finally made some good progress.
His suggestion is to do these removals in Linux 7.4, which is supposed to land sometime between December 2026 and January 2027, with the CPU support getting dropped a release after that.
The plan has been around for some time; the earlier proposition was removal in 2025 or 2026, after the matching LTS kernel shipped. Arnd opened his July thread by apologizing for letting the earlier attempt remain idle for almost two years.
What he calls cleaning out the deprecated platform code now runs to about 300 patches. This first series removes just the arch/arm/mach-* code and the Kconfig bits that depend on it.
What’s going away
These will sound like a collection of 1990s and 2000s hardware that used to be relevant but aren’t anymore.
The platforms losing support are the SA1100 boards, the Acorn RiscPC, Footbridge, the legacy PXA board files, and the Orion, Dove, and MV78xx0 boards.
The same series also takes out the OMAP24xx, i.MX31, and no-MMU i.MX chips, LPC18xx and Axxia, along with the STM32F4, F7 and H7 microcontrollers, Versatile MPS2, and AT91 SAMV7.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that these boards will suddenly stop working (stating the obvious, I know). Any one of the devices listed above just won’t be able to run a mainline kernel from 7.4 or 7.5 onwards since the code that lets them boot is slated for deletion.
Another thing worth knowing is that in the same 7.3 cycle, Linux has gained support for other Arm-powered chips like Apple’s M3 Pro, Max, and Ultra, Samsung’s Exynos 1580, and Qualcomm’s Shikra.
This shows the continuously shifting nature of the kernel, which has to regularly adapt to new hardware while also ditching old support that isn’t used by many.
Linus has been here before
If you think about it, Linus Torvalds has been a strong proponent of removing such old code.
Back in 2022, he asked whether it was time for the i486 series of CPUs to be dropped from Linux, seeing that i386 was already gone in 2012. By 2025, Linus was saying that there was no real reason for anybody to waste their time developing for the platform.
So I anticipate that he will accept these removals, unless there are any shortcomings that have gone by unchecked.
Even so, old hardware has its advocates. People and enterprises do keep these machines running, and Arnd has left the window open for anyone who wants to argue against their removal before the drivers go.
