Linux 8250/16550 UART Serial Driver Seeing Some Modernization Work In 2026

The Linux 8250 serial driver as the universal/legacy driver for 8250 and 16550 type serial ports has been seeing some modernization work recently with a number of 8250 serial patches having now been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel.

With the TTY/serial driver changes that were sent out and subsequently merged yesterday, Greg Kroah-Hartman noted that there were 8250 driver updates and reworks to make it more "modern". The 8250 UART is common in older hardware -- going back to the late 1970s and 1980s -- and the faster 16450/16550 also supported by this driver. Now thanks to the open-source community, the Linux 8250 serial driver is still seeing improvements in 2026.

The 8250 driver in Linux 7.2 now supports console flow control, fixes a possible soft lock-up scenario, and other code clean-ups. Other 8250 serial drivers like the 8250_mtk now has ACPI support, the 8250_dw driver has remove the clock-notifier infrastructure, and other code cleaning and modernization.

This pull also removes the synclink_gt serial driver that was used for SyncLink GT and SyncLink AC devices from MicroGate Systems. The synclink_gt driver was marked as broken since July 2023 due to "severe structural problems". With no one stepping up to improve that serial driver in the past three years and no clear indicators of anyone actively using this driver since 2016, it's being removed. Gutting out the synclink_gt driver lightens the kernel by more than five thousand lines.

The full list of TTY/serial driver changes for Linux 7.2 can be found via this pull request.