Re: the future of r8188eu (was: Re: [PATCH 1/2] staging: rtl8723bs: Fix key-store index handling)

[Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Tue, Mar 07, 2023 at 09:40:10PM +0100, Martin Kaiser wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Thus wrote Hans de Goede (hdegoede@redhat.com):
> 
> > Note I have heard that the r8188eu is now (starting with 6.2 ?) supported
> > by one of the non staging realtek wifi drivers. So I think that maybe it
> > can just be removed from staging altogether ?
> 
> thanks for bringing this up.
> 
> Indeed, the r8xxxu driver does now support the rtl8188eu chipset. The
> code for this chip has landed in Linus' tree for 6.3-rc1.
> 
> The r8xxxu driver uses mac80211 and seems to work well (at least for
> me). The Kconfig entry says that features like power management are
> missing, this is supported by r8188eu.
> 
> So this raises the question about the future of r8188eu. It might have
> more features, which are probably not well tested, but its integration
> into the rest of the kernel is far behind rtl8xxxu. A lot of people (myself
> included) have submitted cleanups for r8188eu and improved it. Still,
> when 6.3 is released, it's likely that the users of rtl8188eu-based
> dongles will switch to rtl8xxxu.
> 
> I guess we might have to bite the bullet and give up on r8188eu...
> 
> What do you think?

Yes, we need to drop the staging driver if there is a "real" kernel
driver that supports the same hardware.  We can't have multiple drivers
in the kernel that try to bind to the same device, we've done that in
the past and it causes nothing but problems.

I'll go make up a patch now to drop the staging driver, thanks for
letting me know.

greg k-h