Re: [PATCH] [RFC] wireless: move obsolete drivers to staging

Geert Uytterhoeven
2023-10-12T15:12:10Z

CC geoff, ppc

On Thu, Oct 12, 2023 at 4:46 PM Kalle Valo <kvalo@kernel.org> wrote:
> "Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@arndb.de> writes:
>
> > On Thu, Oct 12, 2023, at 13:47, Kalle Valo wrote:
> >>
> >> Is anyone willing to submit patches? Use wireless-next as the baseline
> >> for patches and one driver per commit, please. That way it's easy to
> >> revert later, if needed (hopefully not).
> >
> > I can do it, I've already done most of the work for moving the
> > drivers, so I just need to split up my existing patch and leave out
> > the bits that get added to drivers/staging.
>
> Awesome, thank you!
>
> > I'll also send Greg a patch to remove rtl8192u now that we know
> > that this has been broken for 7 years. Similarly, I'd include
> > another patch to remove PCMCIA support for libertas, as that
> > would otherwise be the only remaining 16-bit PCMCIA wlan card,
> > and I could find no indication of this one ever being popular,
> > unlike the USB/SDIO/SPI variants of the same device or the
> > other PCMCIA drivers.
> >
> > This would leave only a handful of wext implementations in the
> > tree: ipw2x00, ps3-gelic-wireless, staging/rtl8712, staging/rtl8192e
> > and staging/ks7010. Since ipw2x00 is apparently still supported
> > in theory and was rather popular on Pentium-M based systems 20
> > years ago, this may still need to be converted to cfg80211
> > before you can remove support for wext style drivers altogether.
> > ps3-gelic-wireless and rtl8712 are also still maintained but have
> > a much smaller user base I assume.
>
> Actually I would prefer to remove ipw2x00 and ps3-gelic-wireless as
> well. I have not seen any evidence that there would be users for those
> drivers. If we find out that there really are users I can easily add the
> drivers back. The faster we get rid of wext the better, it really needs
> to go away.
>
> --
> https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-wireless/list/
>
> https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/developers/documentation/submittingpatches