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This is not correct. The api that was disabled was deprecated for over a decade when disabled. It was an api that wasn't meant to be used. Zol folks kept using it out of tree and when Linus finally removed/hidden them people went apeshit thinking it was some sort of attack. It wasnt, it was 12 years late...

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Quoting Linus himself (https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=189711&curpost...):

> We didn't go out of our way to deliberately break anything.

> But we do occasionally turn symbols that aren't meant to be used outside the kernel into GPL-only, because they have some internal implementation issues.

An api may not be meant to be used but what makes it important to hide it? They could just let it be until there is a real need to delete it. Just going out of your way to hide something is a bit hard to understand.

It is the next step leading up to deleting it.

There are very good reasons to delete unmaintained or hard-to-maintain code that nothing important depends on, or should depend on. But just deleting it creates hardships, so things happen in stages.

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