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

From: Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>
To: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>, Kalle Valo <kvalo@kernel.org>,
	Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
Cc: 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
Subject: Re: [PATCH] [RFC] wireless: move obsolete drivers to staging
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 11:18:57 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <2017087fd471048ff1edb6e57e61883b4ae084be.camel@redhat.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <63e57ef8-c9f2-489a-8df8-51dcffd437c6@app.fastmail.com>

On Thu, 2023-10-12 at 16:36 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> 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 was only for CF cards of which there were a couple; I still have
cards but don't have a machine with CF anymore. USB/SDIO/SPI (as you
point out) have much higher usage.

ACK from me (if my historical libertas involvement counts for anything)
on removing Libertas CF support.

Dan

> 
> 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
> 