Re: [ANN] Registration and Request for Topics for the Media Summit on May 13th in Nice, France

Mauro Carvalho Chehab
2025-04-08T06:59:07Z

Em Tue, 8 Apr 2025 08:42:58 +0200
Hans Verkuil <hverkuil@xs4all.nl> escreveu:

> On 08/04/2025 07:31, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> > Em Mon, 7 Apr 2025 22:39:09 +0300
> > Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> escreveu:
> >
> >> I would like to propose the following topic.
> >>
> >> Review of the status of staging drivers
> >>
> >> We have a set of 11 drivers in drivers/staging/media/, with various
> >> states of maturity and development activity.
> >
> > On a quick look, we have there:
> >
> > 1. source "drivers/staging/media/atomisp/Kconfig"
> > 2. source "drivers/staging/media/av7110/Kconfig"
> > 3. source "drivers/staging/media/imx/Kconfig"
> > 4. source "drivers/staging/media/ipu3/Kconfig"
> > 5. source "drivers/staging/media/max96712/Kconfig"
> > 6. source "drivers/staging/media/meson/vdec/Kconfig"
> > 7. source "drivers/staging/media/rkvdec/Kconfig"
> > 8. source "drivers/staging/media/starfive/Kconfig"
> > 9. source "drivers/staging/media/sunxi/Kconfig"
> > 10. source "drivers/staging/media/tegra-video/Kconfig"
> > 11. source "drivers/staging/media/deprecated/atmel/Kconfig"
> >
> >> drivers/staging/ is not meant as a place for drivers to die,
> >
> > It is, actually: we usually move things there before dropping,
> > because, on most cases, they could be salvaged if someone is
> > interested on it.
> >
> >> we should nudge the relevant
> >> maintainers and consider dropping drivers that show no hope of
> >> progressing.
> >
> > Fully agreed.
> >
> > -
> >
> > Yet, while it makes sense to have action plans for drivers on staging,
> > I don't think that the Media Summit is the best place to discuss,
> > as people that might be involved with them may not be able to
> > participate there.
>
> Actually, I think quite a few of the relevant people will be there.

Good! Still, before taking any decisions/actions of dropping drivers,
we'll need to have discussions via ML.

> And I think it doesn't hurt to go through the list once a year.

Sure.

>
> Regards,
>
> Hans
>
> >
> > See, there are different situations there, like:
> >
> > - platform drivers: at worse case, those should be removed when
> > the core/DT support for such platform is removed. We removed
> > several such drivers in the past. We can also remove them earlier,
> > if there are reasons for doing that and nobody is complaining;
> >
> > - drivers like atomisp that takes a lot of efforts to be promoted.
> > As long as I see some progress (and we've been seeing progress
> > on every kernel version), I can't see any reason why removing it.
> >
> > - drivers like ipu3, which is for an entire family of PC CPUs.
> > I prefer not dropping drivers like these unless we have very good
> > reasons to do so. On the other hand, we are seeing very little
> > progress on those.
> >
> > Anyway, better to split this into different threads, copying
> > the people involved on the recent changes for such drivers.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Mauro
>