Linux To Remove ISA Speech Synthesizer Driver That Likely Hasn't Been Used In Decades
Linux is set to remove the ISA speech synthesizer driver known as Double Talk in its upcoming 7.2 kernel cycle. This decision follows the trend of phasing out obsolete hardware support to reduce maintenance burdens. The driver has not been actively maintained for over two decades and is likely unused, with similar functionality available through other drivers.
- ▪The Double Talk driver supports the RC Systems DoubleTalk PC ISA speech synthesizer card.
- ▪The driver has not received meaningful updates in over twenty years.
- ▪The removal aims to reduce future maintenance workload for the Linux kernel.
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Record
| Original publisher | Phoronix |
| Canonical URL | https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Dropping-Double-Talk |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 08:34:43 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-24T12:42:32.496Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-24T12:42:32.496Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | lO-iiJ1t4S1t · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Linux To Remove ISA Speech Synthesizer Driver That Likely Hasn't Been Used In Decades Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 24 May 2026 at 08:34 AM EDT. Add A Comment Following the process of phasing out Intel 486 CPU support and other old hardware drivers that were dropped in the Linux 7.1 kernel cycle for reducing the kernel maintenance burden, the upcoming Linux 7.2 cycle is continuing the trend of phasing out some of the old hardware support that is very obsolete, likely having no users on the latest upstream kernels, and no one formally maintaining the obsolete drivers. The latest driver on the chopping block is the Double Talk driver as an ISA speech synthesizer driver.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Phoronix.