Stanislaw Gruszka [off-list ref] writes:

On Fri, Sep 21, 2018 at 02:03:55PM +0800, yhchuang@realtek.com wrote:

quoted

From: Yan-Hsuan Chuang <redacted>

This is a new mac80211 driver for Realtek 802.11ac wireless network chips.
rtwlan supports 8822BE and 8822CE chips, and will be able to support
multi-vif combinations in run-time.

For now, only PCI bus is supported, but rtwlan was originally designed
to optionally support three buses includes USB & SDIO. USB & SDIO modules
will soon be supported by rtwlan, with configurable core module to fit
with different bus modules in the same time.

For example, if we choose 8822BE and 8822CU, only PCI & USB modules will
be selected, built, loaded into kernel. This is one of the major
difference from rtlwifi, which can only support specific combinations.

Another difference from rtlwifi is that rtwlan is designed to support
the latest Realtek 802.11ac wireless network chips like 8822B and
8822C series. Compared to the earlier chips supported by rtlwifi like
the 802.11n 8192EE chipset or 802.11ac 8821AE/8812AE chips, newer ICs
have different MAC & PHY settings, such as new multi-port feature for the
MAC layer design and Jaguar2/Jaguar3 PHY layer IPs.

Multi-Port feature is also supported under rtwlan's software architecture.
rtlwifi can only support one vif in the same time, most because of the
hardware limitations for early chips, hence the original design of it
also restricts the usage of multi-vif support, so latest chipset seems not
take advantages from its new MAC engine.

However, rtwlan can run multiple vifs concurrently by holding them on
hardware ports provided by MAC engine, so we can easily start different
roles on a single device.

Based on the reasons mentioned before, we implemented rtwlan. It had many
authors, they are listed here alphabetically:

Ping-Ke Shih [off-list ref]
Tzu-En Huang [off-list ref]
Yan-Hsuan Chuang [off-list ref]

I didn't do detailed review, but my general impression is very very
positive. New driver looks great!

I also did a quick 10 min look at the driver and indeed in general it
looks good.

Just 2 generic remarks:
- please add MAINTAINERS file entry
- please post a patch or request to remove staging/rtlwifi driver
  since this one is replace for it (8822BE PCI-ID is the same)

Something I noticed:

o Magic numbers (BIT(1) etc) in quite a few places.

o Personally not really fond of "#ifdef LITTLE_ENDIAN" usage, but I
  guess we can live with that?

o To me the name "rtwlan" sounds confusing when one compares it with
  "rtlwifi". And how would the possible next generation 11ax driver be
  then called? As a good example I really like the driver name mt76,
  could this one have something similar to make it more descriptive?

I also pushed this to the pending branch on wireless-drivers-next so
that kbuild bot can extensively test it.

-- 
Kalle Valo