2023-10-12 14:37:19

by Arnd Bergmann

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

On Thu, Oct 12, 2023, at 13:47, Kalle Valo wrote:
>
> Is anyone willing to submit patches? Use wireless-next as the baseline
> for patches and one driver per commit, please. That way it's easy to
> revert later, if needed (hopefully not).

I can do it, I've already done most of the work for moving the
drivers, so I just need to split up my existing patch and leave out
the bits that get added to drivers/staging.

I'll also send Greg a patch to remove rtl8192u now that we know
that this has been broken for 7 years. Similarly, I'd include
another patch to remove PCMCIA support for libertas, as that
would otherwise be the only remaining 16-bit PCMCIA wlan card,
and I could find no indication of this one ever being popular,
unlike the USB/SDIO/SPI variants of the same device or the
other PCMCIA drivers.

This would leave only a handful of wext implementations in the
tree: ipw2x00, ps3-gelic-wireless, staging/rtl8712, staging/rtl8192e
and staging/ks7010. Since ipw2x00 is apparently still supported
in theory and was rather popular on Pentium-M based systems 20
years ago, this may still need to be converted to cfg80211
before you can remove support for wext style drivers altogether.
ps3-gelic-wireless and rtl8712 are also still maintained but have
a much smaller user base I assume.

Arnd


2023-10-12 14:46:38

by Kalle Valo

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

"Arnd Bergmann" <[email protected]> writes:

> On Thu, Oct 12, 2023, at 13:47, Kalle Valo wrote:
>>
>> Is anyone willing to submit patches? Use wireless-next as the baseline
>> for patches and one driver per commit, please. That way it's easy to
>> revert later, if needed (hopefully not).
>
> I can do it, I've already done most of the work for moving the
> drivers, so I just need to split up my existing patch and leave out
> the bits that get added to drivers/staging.

Awesome, thank you!

> I'll also send Greg a patch to remove rtl8192u now that we know
> that this has been broken for 7 years. Similarly, I'd include
> another patch to remove PCMCIA support for libertas, as that
> would otherwise be the only remaining 16-bit PCMCIA wlan card,
> and I could find no indication of this one ever being popular,
> unlike the USB/SDIO/SPI variants of the same device or the
> other PCMCIA drivers.
>
> This would leave only a handful of wext implementations in the
> tree: ipw2x00, ps3-gelic-wireless, staging/rtl8712, staging/rtl8192e
> and staging/ks7010. Since ipw2x00 is apparently still supported
> in theory and was rather popular on Pentium-M based systems 20
> years ago, this may still need to be converted to cfg80211
> before you can remove support for wext style drivers altogether.
> ps3-gelic-wireless and rtl8712 are also still maintained but have
> a much smaller user base I assume.

Actually I would prefer to remove ipw2x00 and ps3-gelic-wireless as
well. I have not seen any evidence that there would be users for those
drivers. If we find out that there really are users I can easily add the
drivers back. The faster we get rid of wext the better, it really needs
to go away.

--
https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-wireless/list/

https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/developers/documentation/submittingpatches

2023-10-12 15:29:02

by Johannes Berg

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

On Thu, 2023-10-12 at 16:36 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>
> ps3-gelic-wireless

Didn't Sony disable Linux on PS3 eventually? Though maybe someone still
has some devices with old software.

johannes