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

Kalle Valo
2023-10-11T08:44:05Z

"Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@arndb.de> writes:

> On Wed, Oct 11, 2023, at 07:40, Kalle Valo wrote:
>> Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> writes:
>>
>> We (the wireless folks) have been talking about dropping legacy drivers
>> on and off for several years now. The problem is that we don't know
>> which of them work and which not, for example IIRC someone reported
>> recently that wl3501 still works.
>>
>> Personally I would be extremly happy to remove all the ancient drivers
>> as that reduces the amount of code for us to maintain but is that the
>> right thing to do for the users? I don't have an answer to that,
>> comments very welcome.
>
> I had a look at what openwrt enables, to see if any of the drivers
> in my RFC patch are actually enabled, if anything supports legacy
> embedded devices with these it would be openwrt. The good news here
> is that openwrt intentionally leaves WEXT disabled, and none of them
> are still in use.

I don't think openwrt is a good metric in this case. These drivers are
for 20+ years old hardware, most likely running on really old x86
laptops. So the chances of them running openwrt on those laptops is low
and I would expect them to run more traditional distros like debian or
ubuntu. But of course this is just guessing.

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