Support for Russian Baikal CPUs is being removed from the Linux kernel during the 7.1 development cycle. The removal began with ATA driver code and device tree bindings, with more patches queued. The primary reasons are that the main contributor, Serge Semin, was removed from the kernel MAINTAINERS file in 2024 along with other Russian developers, leaving the code unmaintained. Baikal Electronics itself went bankrupt in 2023 after Western sanctions cut off TSMC manufacturing access and ARM licenses following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The company has since pivoted to RISC-V microcontrollers, but the old ARM/MIPS kernel code has no active maintainer. Users running Linux on Baikal hardware will need to stay on Linux 6.18 LTS or earlier.
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