Linux 6.13 cleared out more than 100k lines of old and unmaintained code while that end of year code cleaning isn’t stopping… With Linux 6.14 at least another old and seemingly useless driver is being gutted from the input subsystem: evbug.
EVBUG is the driver for the Linux kernel input subsystem’s event debugging. Enabling the EVBUG driver (INPUT_EVBUG) will cause all input events to be logged to the system log… So all key presses, mouse movements, etc, will end up in the kernel log. That includes all key presses, so logging your passwords and other data to the kernel log. Practically a built-in kernel key logger.
But besides being an admitted security threat, the EVBUG driver appears to be useless to developers and has been so for many years. SUSE engineer Jiri Kosina is removing the EVBUG driver for Linux 6.14 and commented on the patch:
“I’ve never heard of anyone having used this driver for debugging at least in over past decade or so. Since we have tools like evtest, this driver seems to be rather superficial.
Also, it apparently causes confusion among people who [accidentally] enable CONFIG_INPUT_EVBUG and are annoyed/confused by their kernel log being spammed by a lot of useless data.
Let’s just remove it.”
That removal has made it into the input subsystem’s “next’ tree and thus is set to be removed for Linux 6.14 in the new year.
