Re: Future of mwifiex driver

[Brian Norris <briannorris@chromium.org>]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2025 at 09:48:13AM +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> 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?!

Is that the argument? Honest question. It's not really clear to me.

From
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240930063701.2566520-1-yu-hao.lin@nxp.com/:

> [1] We had considered adding IW61x to mwifiex, however due to FW
>     architecture, host command interface and supported features are
>     significantly different, doing this on mwifiex will carry a lot of
>     burdens. The effort of making sure no regression is also a huge effort.
>     We must create a new driver nxpwifi. Subsequent NXP chipsets will be
>     added and sustained on nxpwifi only.

That sounds like you noted one of their reasons ("making sure no
regression is also a huge effort"), but they also claim the FW
architecture and host command interface is significantly different. I
don't recall seeing a proper discussion of that -- although Sascha seems
to claim [1] it wasn't that hard for him to support iw61x via mwifiex.

Brian

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/Z8rGDTjkwKAVaREL@pengutronix.de/