Linux block maintainer Jens Axboe queued up a patch this week to drop the pktcdvd driver from the mainline kernel, which is expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle. The pktcdvd driver has been in the kernel for over two decades since the Linux 2.6 days for packet-writing CD/DVD support albeit is hardly useful in today’s world.
This driver is for packet writing on CD/DVD media and was previously deprecated in the kernel. It was used for CD-RW / DVD-RW / DVD+RW / DVDRAM drives that support packet writing.
The pktcdvd driver was deprecated all the way back in 2016 and is finally now on the chopping block for good. Axboe commented on the patch queued in linux-block.git’s for-next branch:
“This driver has long outlived it’s utility, and it’s broken and unloved. The main use case for this was direct mount with UDF of cd-rw drives that required 32kb packets. It would collect writes into that size and write them out in multiples of that. That’s not a common use case anymore, the world has moved on from those kinds of media. To make matters worse, it’s actively breaking setups where it’s not even required or useful.”
Back in 2022 the driver was initially removed from the kernel for already being long-deprecated and unmaintained,but in early 2023 the driver removal was reverted on the basis of there still being users of the driver. Now in 2025, no one has stepped up to properly maintain the driver and thus the expectation now is that it will be removed for good.
The latest motivation for removing pktcdvd stems from this recent Debian bug report over blkid hanging forever after inserting a DVD-RAM disc into the drive. This kernel driver is broken and while the Kconfig text mentioned the possibility of someone developing a better user-space solution for handling the packet writing driver’s role, no one has contributed. Jens Axboe commented on that bug report:
“No work has been done there, to my knowledge. But as the current driver is totally broken and people aren’t even complaining about that (outside of running into that for unrelated reasons), I don’t think there’s any reason for keeping the driver in-tree.”
So barring any last minute objections by Linus Torvalds or others, the patch removing the pktcdvd is queued into the block subsystem’s “for-next” branch and in turn should be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window to lay this old and unmaintained driver to rest.
