Here’s something that wasn’t on my bingo card for this year of the “MKISS” driver for ham radio being modernized in 2026 as opposed to just being dropped. The MKISS code hasn’t seen much driver activity since the original Git import of the Linux kernel more than twenty years ago.

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this Sunday by open-source developer Mashiro Chen is modernizing and cleaning up the MKISS ham radio driver. This is a serial port KISS protocol driver for exchanging data between a computer and terminal node computer for AX.25 amateur radio “ham radio” connections.