Re: RFC: Remove gspca and old ISA radio drivers

[Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2026 at 08:29:58AM +0200, Hans Verkuil wrote:
> On 22/09/2026 17:55, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 22, 2026 at 05:37:03PM +0200, Hans Verkuil wrote:
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> Would there be any objection to removing the gspca driver for all those old
> >> webcams with horrible quality and that nobody should be using anyway, and
> >> for the old ISA radio drivers where I am pretty sure I'm the only one that
> >> can actually test them (and even that is questionable).
> >>
> >> I could move them to staging/deprecated for a kernel cycle, but to be honest
> >> I think we should just kick them out.
> > 
> > No objection from me. gspca doesn't bother me though, as it's quite
> > self-contained. I would be happier to see the em28xx driver go when it
> > will be time, as it's one of the few users of some legacy subdev APIs I
> > would like to drop. As far as I understand, that driver is however more
> > widely used.
> 
> That's still in use, and quite a lot too. I still get patches adding support
> for new em28xx products. If you want to get rid of legacy in that driver,
> then it is best to get em28xx based hardware and make patches. This driver
> won't go away any time soon.

Yes, I know. I was expressing a long term wish :-)

> >> It also allows me to throw away a lot of old hardware and make some room for
> >> new hardware :-)
> > 
> > I wonder if some computer science museums would have an interest in
> > those. I suppose they're not the most interesting devices.
> 
> Not old enough, and not special enough.
> 
> Now, I also have one of the first consumer webcams (Connectix QuickCam,
> parallel port, grayscale), that one might indeed be of interest for a museum.

At the very least for the section of the museum aimed at generating
reactions along the line of "PEOPLE DID THAT????" :-)

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart