Re: Two rtlwifi drivers?

Larry Finger [off-list ref] writes:

On 10/11/2017 08:13 AM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 12:06:00PM +0300, Kalle Valo wrote:
I think it's horrid too.  But, if no one is able to do the real work
here, we hurt users who just need to use their hardware to get things
done.

And it seems like the company isn't willing to do the real work, so
dumping this in staging is the best we can do at the moment.

However, if this causes you problems, that's not good at all either.
Getting "real" support for this hardware is key, and hopefully can
happen somehow.  But fixing up the staging driver is almost never the
way to do it, as you know :)

So what to do?  Any ideas?  What makes your life easier?  You can just
ignore the staging tree, as it should not affect your portion of the
kernel at all, right?

Greg and Kalle,

We can all agree that this situation is bad; however, several of the
points made in your E-mails need to be addressed.

First of all, I am not an employee of Realtek, and I have no knowledge
of the internals of any of their chips. I have never signed a
non-disclosure agreement, and the only thing that I have received from
them are sample chips for testing. My main interest is in helping the
user experience.

And you are doing a great job at that! My only gripe here is forking the
driver.

As there are a number of users with the new RTL8822BE device, that
meant getting an in-kernel driver to them as soon as possible. As
stated earlier, adding this particular device to the rtlwifi family
involved roughly 120K lines of new code. Given our recent experience
in getting code accepted into the wireless tree meant that this
additional code would not have been accepted for many months. For that
reason, we chose the staging route. It is important that we get this
right as Realtek tells me that there will be two additional new
drivers in the coming 6 months.

If there are new drivers coming in 6 months they should submitting
patches already now, this is my main point. Don't work in a waterfall
model, release early and release often.

As to the convergence of the rtlwifi code between staging and
wireless, I applied the 40 or 50 patches in my queue to the wireless
version to create the version that went into staging. If any of the
current patches to wireless do not seem to be in the staging version,
sometimes temporary changes are necessary so that the intermediate
drivers will build and work. Yes, it is code churn, but necessary to
keep patches small. In keeping with Kalle's requests, only a fraction
of those patches have been submitted to him.

My intent is to have the RTL8822BE driver moved from staging to
mainline no later than 4.17. The affected drivers rtl_pci, rtlwifi and
becoex will be moved in that order. Of course, the required changes
will need to be in wireless before staging is changed, which will slow
the process.

Great to hear that you will be working on that. But yeah, that's quite
an effort. IMHO a lot more work than if you would be working only with
drivers/net/wireless.

As I see it, the switch can only occur with a new version.

Yeah, we need to be very careful with the switch so that we don't break
existing setups.

My opinion is that the company has gone a long ways toward meeting the
requirements of the Linux kernel. A lot of their code is written for
Windows and Linux, with emphasis on Windows, which complicates matters
as not all of the changes for Linux can be backported.

I think all vendors had these huge OS agnostic drivers before: TI,
Atheros/QCA etc. So it's not really a new thing and still most of the
companies have been able to adapt one way or another.

Prior to the introduction of these drivers in 2.6.38, drivers were
released periodically as tar files with no information regarding
intermediate steps were recorded other than the SVN modification
number. At least now, we get relatively small changes.

Yes, the changes might be small but to me it seems Realtek still dumps
them in one big release. That's the problem here.

I have been pleased and surprised at the stability and performance of
the driver in staging. Other than possible changes required by
reviewers when it is moved, it is ready for the wireless tree.

Finally, I have notified my Realtek contact that I do not plan to
continue as the maintainer of these drivers very much longer due to my
age. I still have the interest, but not always the energy. The people
at Realtek have proposed a plan that seems workable. Of course, there
will be hiccups, but the current process does not seem to be that
smooth.

Sorry to hear that you are stepping down as the maintainer but it's
undertandable as you have had so much work to do. But I hope you still
stick around.

-- 
Kalle Valo