Re: [Ksummit-discuss] Draft agenda for the kernel summit

[Marcel Holtmann <marcel@holtmann.org>]

Hi Arnd,

>> On Thu, 2015-10-15 at 19:41 -0500, Rob Herring wrote:
>> the unwillingness of chip
>> vendors (hi Broadcom, Qualcomm, MediaTek) to have an upstream driver
>> that they actually use (some of those do support an upstream driver,
>> but don't ship that one and it doesn't nearly have the necessary
>> features, while the actually used (still open source [1]) driver is a
>> pile of spaghetti code that we'd probably never merge upstream...)
>> 
>> [1] except for MediaTek, I think, who seem to never be releasing source
>> code for any of their kernels
>> 
> 
> (getting offtopic here)
> 
> My understanding is that MediaTek has improved much recently and their
> mt76 wireless driver source is available and getting upstreamed now
> and integrated into openwrt now. OTOH, Broadcom apparently regressed and is
> no longer releasing any source code to their newer softmac parts (bcm4360,
> bcm4352) or patching brcmsmac to support them, while they on the other
> hand got better at upstreaming their SoC support recently.

are sure that Mediatek got better? I am not convinced by that.

I think there is also a large difference in their MiniPCI cards compared to their connectivity hub in their SoC. The Bluetooth side for example is largely copying existing drivers, hacking their vendor specific behavior in and then throwing it over the wall.

Regards

Marcel