Re: [PATCH v2] drivers/crypto: Mark QCE as BROKEN

[Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2026 at 09:07:45AM -0400, Eric Biggers wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2026 at 06:47:07AM +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Sun, Jul 12, 2026 at 05:31:31PM -0400, Demi Marie Obenour via B4 Relay wrote:
> > > From: Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com>
> > > 
> > > This driver is harmful:
> > > 
> > > - It is much slower than the CPU [1] [2].
> > > - It Has a history of bugs [2] [3].
> > > - It does not have exclusive access to the hardware [4], causing races
> > >   with the secure world.
> > > - It register its implementations with too low a cra_priority for them
> > >   to be actually used [5].
> > > 
> > > Therefore, disable it to ensure that nobody builds it into kernels they
> > > intend to ship.
> > > 
> > > In the future, the driver will be used for processing restricted media
> > > content.  However, the kernel does not currently support this.  Since
> > > the driver will have future uses, allow building it if COMPILE_TEST is
> > > enabled.
> > 
> > Why not just delete it now, and then bring it back when it is needed in
> > the future?  Otherwise this will just trip up the static code checkers
> > who will attempt to "fix" things in it.
> 
> That makes sense to me, but Qualcomm pushed back on deletion:
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/20260602-qcom-qce-broken-v1-1-a4ef756089e0@oss.qualcomm.com/
> 
> But I've still not seen any evidence that this driver is useful for
> anything or has any users.  Even Qualcomm seems to be unwilling to make
> such claims; they only claim that the IP is used (i.e., not in Linux)
> and that new features are planned.

Well we don't normally have drivers that are marked as BROKEN just
laying around in the tree these days, especially given that a LLM is
bound to do a drive-by and find lots of issues that people will not
realize doesn't matter given that the code is never actually built.

But hey, it's not my subsystem, if you want to keep it here, fine with
me, just asking :)

thanks,

greg k-h