Re: Future of mwifiex driver

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

On Thu, Mar 06, 2025 at 11:17:15AM +0100, Francesco Dolcini wrote:
> + Jeff Chen <jeff.chen_1@nxp.com>, tsung-hsien.hsieh@nxp.com
> + Stefan Roese <sr@denx.de>
> 
> Hello 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.
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> While I agree on the challenging situation, I would not call it "very
> bad" ... as you know there are multiple people with stake on this driver
> (I added SR in Cc here, that I just discovered has some interested on
> this).
> 
> In the short term I think that improving mwifiex driver is going to be
> beneficial for everybody, currently this is not going as smooth as we'd
> like, as you wrote and as already commented by Brian.
> 
> And the next step would be to figure out how to enable newer Wi-Fi chip
> solution from NXP in mainline, we all have our ideas and we are not
> moving forward. NXP keeps pushing for a solution that was already
> rejected multiple times and so far it was not successful on explaining
> why this is the correct way forward. Here I would agree that the
> situation is "very bad" at the moment.

I have a patch adding iw61x support to the mwifiex driver. Maybe if I
send that for inclusion we can get NXP  to explain to us what's actually
missing in this patch to properly support it.

> 
> 
> > I think part of the solution should be that we start cleaning up the
> > mwifiex driver
> 
> Ack. I would suggest that we focus on this. I can help with some
> review/test (as partially done in the past), but I cannot commit to
> actively work on much more than that as of now.

Ok, I'll continue with my series then and skip the MAC address patch if
that's what blocking it.

Sascha

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