From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-path: Received: from s3.sipsolutions.net ([5.9.151.49]:43695 "EHLO sipsolutions.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751103AbcFGHOE (ORCPT ); Tue, 7 Jun 2016 03:14:04 -0400 Message-ID: <1465283632.2304.16.camel@sipsolutions.net> (sfid-20160607_091408_316148_D8CEDC48) Subject: Re: wext: making deprecation more visible From: Johannes Berg To: Kalle Valo Cc: Prasun Maiti , "David S. Miller" , Dibyajyoti Ghosh , Ujjal Roy , WiFi Mailing List Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2016 09:13:52 +0200 In-Reply-To: <87porxlfqb.fsf_-_@purkki.adurom.net> References: <1464248432-12595-1-git-send-email-prasunmaiti87@gmail.com> <1464690345.3076.17.camel@sipsolutions.net> <1464979620.2224.5.camel@sipsolutions.net> <87porxlfqb.fsf_-_@purkki.adurom.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: > I know we can't remove wext because of legacy applications but is > there anything more we can do to make the users aware that wext is > depreciated and really should be avoided? For example a onetime > kernel warning? Or is that too spammy? Anything else? The problem is that wext is in this weird hybrid state where it's really deprecated if you can use nl80211, but you are required to use wext if you can't use nl80211. Now, we disabled wext-for-cfg80211 by default, but it's still there and could be used for some cases. We probably should try to fix things, but I realize that code that never gets tested [1]. Maybe we could print a message in the special cfg80211-wext case, which has a special case in wext-core to avoid creating all those iw_handler tables? johannes [1] and yeah - people move to nl80211 once told, so there's evidently very little incentive to keep using wext, so in reality people don't really seem to have applications that only use wext even with pure cfg80211 drivers ...