Re: Future of mwifiex driver

[Francesco Dolcini <francesco@dolcini.it>]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2025 at 11:10:21AM +0100, Sascha Hauer wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 06, 2025 at 11:17:15AM +0100, Francesco Dolcini wrote:
> > + Jeff Chen <jeff.chen_1@nxp.com>, tsung-hsien.hsieh@nxp.com
> > + Stefan Roese <sr@denx.de>
> > 
> > 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 have a patch adding iw61x support to the mwifiex driver. Maybe if I
> send that for inclusion we can get NXP  to explain to us what's actually
> missing in this patch to properly support it.

I would have HW available to test it, and not just review the code,
looking forward to it.

Francesco