Re: [PATCH] [RFC] wireless: move obsolete drivers to staging

From: Kalle Valo <kvalo@kernel.org>
To: "Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: "Jakub Kicinski" <kuba@kernel.org>,
	 "Greg Kroah-Hartman" <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
	 "Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@kernel.org>,
	"Nicolas Ferre" <nicolas.ferre@microchip.com>,
	 "Alexandre Belloni" <alexandre.belloni@bootlin.com>,
	 "Claudiu Beznea" <claudiu.beznea@tuxon.dev>,
	 "Pavel Machek" <pavel@ucw.cz>,
	 "David S . Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>,
	 "Larry Finger" <Larry.Finger@lwfinger.net>,
	 linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org,
	 linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org,
	linux-staging@lists.linux.dev
Subject: Re: [PATCH] [RFC] wireless: move obsolete drivers to staging
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 17:48:47 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87fs2fgals.fsf@kernel.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <63e57ef8-c9f2-489a-8df8-51dcffd437c6@app.fastmail.com> (Arnd Bergmann's message of "Thu, 12 Oct 2023 16:36:26 +0200")

"Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@arndb.de> writes:

> On Thu, Oct 12, 2023, at 13:47, Kalle Valo wrote:
>>
>> Is anyone willing to submit patches? Use wireless-next as the baseline
>> for patches and one driver per commit, please. That way it's easy to
>> revert later, if needed (hopefully not).
>
> I can do it, I've already done most of the work for moving the
> drivers, so I just need to split up my existing patch and leave out
> the bits that get added to drivers/staging.

Awesome, thank you!

> I'll also send Greg a patch to remove rtl8192u now that we know
> that this has been broken for 7 years. Similarly, I'd include
> another patch to remove PCMCIA support for libertas, as that
> would otherwise be the only remaining 16-bit PCMCIA wlan card,
> and I could find no indication of this one ever being popular,
> unlike the USB/SDIO/SPI variants of the same device or the
> other PCMCIA drivers.
>
> This would leave only a handful of wext implementations in the
> tree: ipw2x00, ps3-gelic-wireless, staging/rtl8712, staging/rtl8192e
> and staging/ks7010. Since ipw2x00 is apparently still supported
> in theory and was rather popular on Pentium-M based systems 20
> years ago, this may still need to be converted to cfg80211
> before you can remove support for wext style drivers altogether.
> ps3-gelic-wireless and rtl8712 are also still maintained but have
> a much smaller user base I assume.

Actually I would prefer to remove ipw2x00 and ps3-gelic-wireless as
well. I have not seen any evidence that there would be users for those
drivers. If we find out that there really are users I can easily add the
drivers back. The faster we get rid of wext the better, it really needs
to go away.

-- 
https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-wireless/list/

https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/developers/documentation/submittingpatches