Future of mwifiex driver

[Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@pengutronix.de>]

I am worried about the future of the mwifiex driver. NXP has an ongoing
effort of forking the driver to support their new chips, but the forked
driver lacks support for the old chips supported by the current mwifiex
driver.

Overall this leaves us and our customers using the mwifiex driver in a
very bad situation.  Johannes made clear that he is not going to merge a
driver that is 70% identical to the existing driver and on the other
hand the existing driver doesn't get forward due to its odd-fixes state
and the potential rise of a new driver which would render work on the
existing driver useless.

I think part of the solution should be that we start cleaning up the
mwifiex driver so that at one point it could

a) be a robust base for a fork, or
b) make the fork unnecessary

This would help people using the mwifiex driver to get a better support
for their hardware.  It would also help NXP by splitting the necessary
changes into easier swallowable parts that are actually reviewable.
Should we really need a fork at some point then much of the review would
have already been done.

I have a series here [1] doing some cleanup work which I'd still like to
get forward.  Johannes made some remarks in [2] and [3] on which parts
of the driver need cleanup. Some more things for cleanup can also be
found in the forked driver code.

I am willing to put more work into the driver in creating and also
reviewing and testing patches, but I would need some path forward for
the driver and I think this needs a commitment from NXP to take the
detour over the mwifiex driver to get their stuff upstream.

Any thoughts?

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-wireless/87ldwyumvq.fsf@kernel.org/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/57ff2078632d8f14ca73c8307dc43585b3d09f50.camel@sipsolutions.net/#r
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/5f5c42585e168e252a5fa3f43325aaa360f6d27a.camel@sipsolutions.net/

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