Is Appletalk gone for good?

For Developers
1

I'm setting up two OpenWRT devices to provide "wifi" to some 30 year old Macintosh computers.

I thought it would be cool, however, to utilize the OpenWRT devices to provide other services. I used the SDK to build an older version of Netatalk (2.2.4) that would allow me to use the OpenWRT devices as an AFP file server and print server (using CUPS, which I've built and set up on the OpenWRT device). Netatalk can integrate with Appletalk to communicate with particularly old software.

Unfortunately, it seems like Appletalk, which used to be available as a kernel module, is no more on OpenWRT.

Is Appletalk something that can be added simply? There is plenty of documentation for making your own packages that I have used, but none for making a kernel module.

2

Dead since macOS 10.6, a decade ago.

As one reference, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk

AppleTalk support was finally removed from the MacOS in Mac OS X v10.6 in 2009.

3

If you use the buildroot try something like this.... or just use make kernel_menuconfig

package/kernel/linux/modules/netsupport.mk

define KernelPackage/appletalk
  SUBMENU:=$(NETWORK_SUPPORT_MENU)
  TITLE:=AppleTalk
  KCONFIG:=CONFIG_ATALK
  FILES:=$(LINUX_DIR)/drivers/net/atalk.ko *** NOTCORRECT
  AUTOLOAD:=$(call AutoProbe,atalk)
endef

define KernelPackage/atalk/description
  Kernel module which adds AppleTalk Protocol

$(eval $(call KernelPackage,atalk))