It's not too often hearing [1]PCMCIA these days as that defunct PC card standard for laptops from the 90's and early 00's. Back in 2023 [2]Linux began dropping old PCMCIA drivers from the kernel while coming as a surprise today are some clean-ups for the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA) subsystem code persisting within the Linux kernel.

Dominik Brodowski sent out a pull request today with PCMCIA fixes for the Linux kernel... This is for Linus Torvalds' discretion whether to merge it now for the ongoing Linux 6.17 cycle or wait until the Linux 6.18 merge window. They are just bug fixes and old code removal but given that PCMCIA hardware is rarely tested these days, it's in no rush for going mainline and there is always the risk of regressions. We'll see if Linus Torvalds decides to pull these fixes now or wait until October for the v6.18 merge window.

This is the first time of having a dedicated PCMCIA pull request in more than one year when a few PCMCIA fixes trickled into Linux 6.11.

These 2025 fixes to the Linux PCMCIA code include a few minor bug fixes and removing some unused code paths. Nothing too exciting besides the fact of PCMCIA code still being touched in the Linux kernel in 2025. See [3]this pull request for any nostalgic PCMCIA laptop users.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/PCMCIA

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.4-Drops-Char-PCMCIA

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/aLfTTBltkS0ONZlZ@shine.dominikbrodowski.net/