Re: Future of mwifiex driver

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

On Fri, Mar 07, 2025 at 09:48:13AM +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Sorry I didn't reply earlier - I was dragging my feet, but also didn't
> really know if I can add anything beyond what I already wrote.
> 
> 
> On Mon, 2025-03-03 at 17:45 -0800, Brian Norris wrote:
> > 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).
> 
> I guess that means could also partially resend the series, and get 11 of
> the 12 in? I see the MAC address handling is first, but a cursory look
> suggests that at least not all of the other would have a hard dependency
> on it.

OK, I'll respin the series without the MAC address patch. Next I'll have
another look at the MAC address patch and see if I can improve it
further and send this as a separate patch.

> > 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.
> 
> Indeed, the above is _definitely_ not true for mwifiex/nxpwifi. I've
> effectively proven in the other thread that it's just a straight up copy
> without any modernisation etc. If there had actually been a real reason
> to not work with the same code base, then that might have made sense -
> perhaps with some library code split out.
> 
> But copying an old crappy driver for the sake of "we don't want to
> maintain an old crappy driver" is a really bad argument to make?!

Thanks for your clear words. For me that means that I can put more
effort into the mwifiex driver without risking that it becomes obsolete
soon.

Sascha

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