April 1, 2026
Farewell, Old Internet?
New Patches Allow Building Linux IPv6-Only, Option to Deprecate "Legacy" IPv4
Linux devs joke about killing old internet tech… but some want it dead for real
TLDR: A Linux developer just proposed making it possible to run Linux without old-style IPv4 internet addresses, treating them as “legacy” and optional. The community is hilariously split between cheering for the future, warning everything will break, and joking we’ll finally be ready sometime around the year 2050.
Linux just lit a match under the internet’s favorite fossil: old-school IP addresses, also known as IPv4. A veteran developer proposed patches that would let you build Linux without IPv4 at all, calling it “Legacy IP” and jokingly marking it for “deprecation” right around April Fools’ Day. Except… he’s only half joking.
The community immediately split into camps. On one side you’ve got the IPv6 purists cheering this on like it’s the revolution. One commenter said they’d enjoy adding extra delay just to punish “legacy IP” users, arguing the internet was meant to be fully reachable and only the newer IPv6 system can fix the mess we’re in. On the other side are the doomsayers predicting a software graveyard: apps breaking forever, and desperate devs begging AI tools to auto‑fix millions of lines of code.
Then there’s the “we’re not ready” crowd, pointing out that big sites like GitHub still don’t play nicely in IPv6‑only setups, and containers and Docker “still crap the bed” if you don’t give them IPv4. The whole thread swings between despair and dark humor, with one user mocking the glacial progress: “We’re so close guys! Another 25 years and we might almost be there!” Others are just grabbing popcorn, waiting for a legendary Linus Torvalds rant to drop and complete the drama.
Key Points
- •A six-patch series by David Woodhouse proposes adding CONFIG_LEGACY_IP to the Linux kernel to toggle IPv4 support.
- •With the patches, the kernel issues a warning if a process listens on an IPv4 (legacy IP) socket and labels IPv4 as deprecated.
- •Despite April 1 timing, Woodhouse clarified he genuinely supports most of the changes, though deprecation and warnings may wait.
- •He aims to cleanly separate CONFIG_INET from CONFIG_IPV4/CONFIG_IPV6 and enable building with either protocol alone.
- •The work enables possible IPv6-only or IPv4-only kernel builds, seen as valuable for forward-looking environments.