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From:   Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
Date:   Thu, 12 Oct 2023 17:11:53 +0200
Message-ID: <CAMuHMdU0P6H=pAGr_KtmecvNxwDLJXYPRbyyELXaCRhNHgzAzg@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] [RFC] wireless: move obsolete drivers to staging
To:     Kalle Valo <kvalo@kernel.org>
Cc:     Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>, Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@kernel.org>,
        Nicolas Ferre <nicolas.ferre@microchip.com>,
        Alexandre Belloni <alexandre.belloni@bootlin.com>,
        Claudiu Beznea <claudiu.beznea@tuxon.dev>,
        Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>,
        "David S . Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>,
        Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@lwfinger.net>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org,
        linux-staging@lists.linux.dev, Geoff Levand <geoff@infradead.org>,
        linuxppc-dev <linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org>
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CC geoff, ppc

On Thu, Oct 12, 2023 at 4:46 PM Kalle Valo <kvalo@kernel.org> wrote:
> "Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@arndb.de> 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