Subject: Re: Path forward for NFC in the kernel

From: Krzysztof Kozlowski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:18:42 +0200

On 16/04/2026 19:10, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> Hi folks!
> 
> We are struggling to keep up with the number of security reports and AI
> generated patches in the kernel. NFC is infamous for being a huge CVE
> magnet. We need someone to step up as a maintainer, create an NFC tree
> and handle all the incoming submissions. Send us (or Linus if you
> prefer) periodic PRs, like WiFi, Bluetooth etc. do. If that does not
> happen I'm afraid we'll have to move the NFC code out of the tree, 
> put it up on GH or some such, and let it accumulate CVEs there..
> 
> I'm planning to send a PR to Linus to shed the unmaintained code early
> next week. We need to have a maintainer established by then.

+Cc David Heidelberg recently trying to use Linux NFC stack,

Just "collecting" patches is not a big deal, I could do this, but
actually reviewing the patches with necessary due diligence is the
effort I could not provide in a reasonable time frame. And picking up
patches without proper review feels risky...

NFC has a long history of issues, first mostly pointed out by syzbot but
now apparently by AI tools. The code base is quite old, with no major
improvements or testings happening but not in a way "oh, it's stable and
working like 'cp' command" but rather "no one knows how many bugs are on
top of each other and if it actually still works".

Syzbot and AI reported bugs encourage random drive-by fixes by people
not testing the code, thus particular bug report might be fixed, but for
example NFC stops working and no one knows that.

Does anyone knows if the NFC stack/drivers actually works fine? Did
anyone test actual devices?

If not, then moving to Github would be even more reasonable.

Another point is that AFAIU, most of real world devices, like
Android-based phones, don't use the Linux NFC stack but their custom
HAL/user-space based libraries and drivers. Some other non-Android
projects use libnfc userspace, which seems to be maintained only as
bugfix (https://github.com/nfc-tools/libnfc/commits/master/).

Best regards,
Krzysztof