Re: Future of mwifiex driver

[Brian Norris <briannorris@chromium.org>]

Hi Sascha,

On Mon, Mar 03, 2025 at 12:05:26PM +0100, Sascha Hauer wrote:
> 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.
[...] 
> I have a series here [1] doing some cleanup work which I'd still like to
> get forward.
[...]
> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-wireless/87ldwyumvq.fsf@kernel.org/

I'll apologize for that one stalling out a bit. IIRC, 11 of 12 patches
looked great, but I got stuck on the "fix MAC address handling" patch,
because it's a lot tougher to guarantee it doesn't break some use cases
while fixing things. But really, it's probably mostly a bandwidth thing
for me, as I really don't have many cycles to spend on things (and
especially when it gets beyond "obvious cleanup" and requires
substantial testing and/or reasoning).

> Any thoughts?

In no particular order:

1. even if NXP (or you, or anyone) does great work, I'm not going to be
   a super helpful maintainer. I simply don't have time to review and
   test substantial contributions.
2. I get the feeling linux-wireless may have problems like #1 in
   general. Johannes can't fill the entire gap Kalle left, for one.
   (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong! Or if other excellent people
   have stepped up on review/maintenance.)
3. Other drivers may look somewhat similar, and yet fork for good
   reasons (like, firmware API revisions; or 802.11 generations; or some
   cross-section of both). I'm looking at rtw88/rtw89 (that I was
   involved with quite a bit), or ath10k/ath11k/ath12k/(have we made it
   to 13 yet?). So forking even with quite a bit of similarity isn't
   necessarily inherently wrong.
4. A key difference between #3 and mwifiex is, like you say, that
   mwifiex has a pretty low quality baseline. If I were maintaining it
   from the beginning, I probably wouldn't have accepted it.
5. I'm open to good people stepping up to fill in #1 -- i.e., include
   more maintainers that have a stake in larger contributions. Frankly,
   my only motivation here is to ensure that existing hardware supported
   by mwifiex doesn't get worse.

So all in all, I think I probably agree with you. But speaking openly, I
don't think I can be a large part of the solution here.

Regards,
Brian