Among the early pull requests sent out in advance of the Linux 7.4 kernel merge window opening were the driver core updates. Standing out here is the new TAINT_FORCED_BIND for dealing with the recent major fuzzing "attack" by AI agents/bots testing impractical driver/hardware combinations.

The Linux bind/unbind interface via sysfs allows for binding arbitrary devices to Linux kernel drivers based on their bus ID. There are some legitimate uses to the bind/unbind interface but fuzzing tools/bots have begun submitting impractical bug reports when attaching random devices to random drivers not meant to be.

Thus for Linux 7.4 is now TAINT_FORCED_BIND to taint the running Linux kernel should bind/unbind sysfs be used to provide a clear indicator to those looking at the bug reports of the potential irrelevance of said report.

Greg KH remarked in adding this new kernel taint that the motivation was driven by "a major fuzzing "attack" through tools like syzbot which decided that it would attempt to just randomly bind any driver to any type of device, causing loads of unneeded errors and pointless kernel patches to be generated by unsuspecting new developers."

So now with the driver core pull request for Linux 7.4, there will be one less nuisance in this AI driven world. That pull also adds a number of new Rust additions too for Linux kernel drivers.