Re: [PATCH] staging: rtl8192u: ieee80211: Silence sparse warning

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

On Wed, 2015-05-13 at 22:04 -0300, Gaston Gonzalez wrote:

>  .../rtl8192u/ieee80211/ieee80211_crypt_tkip.c      | 53
> ++--------------------
>  include/net/mac80211.h                             |  3 ++
>  net/mac80211/tkip.c                                |  9 ++--
>  3 files changed, 10 insertions(+), 55 deletions(-)

That doesn't seem right to me. Clearly, that's a staging driver that
ships its own 802.11 subsystem, and bears no existing relation to
mac80211. Exporting a mac80211 internal function to make such a driver
happy makes me very suspicious. That function might not be very mac80211
specific, but exporting it from mac80211 doesn't seem right, that
introduces a massive and mostly artificial dependency into the driver.

Now arguably that driver is in staging and that doesn't matter, but then
why even bother cleaning this up? It seems likely that a well-written
driver for this would use mac80211, and not have to bother with this at
all since it could then use ieee80211_get_tkip_rx_p1k() or
ieee80211_get_tkip_p2k() or the update_tkip_key() method.

So I'm not fond of this patch and without a *very very* good reason and
explanation I'm not going to merge the mac80211 part. It certainly
bothers me much less that a crappy staging driver has a few lines of
duplicated code than it would to export mac80211 internals that real
mac80211 drivers don't need.

johannes