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

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>]

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.

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