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

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

On Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 07:32:51AM +0100, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> 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.

For those that didn't see it, the patch that removes the staging driver
is here:
	https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230308131934.380395-1-gregkh@linuxfoundation.org