Re: Future of mwifiex driver

[Francesco Dolcini <francesco@dolcini.it>]

+ Jeff Chen <jeff.chen_1@nxp.com>, tsung-hsien.hsieh@nxp.com
+ Stefan Roese <sr@denx.de>

Hello Sascha,

On Mon, Mar 03, 2025 at 12:05:26PM +0100, Sascha Hauer wrote:
> I am worried about the future of the mwifiex driver. NXP has an ongoing
> effort of forking the driver to support their new chips, but the forked
> driver lacks support for the old chips supported by the current mwifiex
> driver.
> 
> Overall this leaves us and our customers using the mwifiex driver in a
> very bad situation.  Johannes made clear that he is not going to merge a
> driver that is 70% identical to the existing driver and on the other
> hand the existing driver doesn't get forward due to its odd-fixes state
> and the potential rise of a new driver which would render work on the
> existing driver useless.

While I agree on the challenging situation, I would not call it "very
bad" ... as you know there are multiple people with stake on this driver
(I added SR in Cc here, that I just discovered has some interested on
this).

In the short term I think that improving mwifiex driver is going to be
beneficial for everybody, currently this is not going as smooth as we'd
like, as you wrote and as already commented by Brian.

And the next step would be to figure out how to enable newer Wi-Fi chip
solution from NXP in mainline, we all have our ideas and we are not
moving forward. NXP keeps pushing for a solution that was already
rejected multiple times and so far it was not successful on explaining
why this is the correct way forward. Here I would agree that the
situation is "very bad" at the moment.


> I think part of the solution should be that we start cleaning up the
> mwifiex driver

Ack. I would suggest that we focus on this. I can help with some
review/test (as partially done in the past), but I cannot commit to
actively work on much more than that as of now.

Francesco