Thanks David. I appreciate your efforts to contribute for WILC driver.

On 22/02/21 5:52 am, David Mosberger-Tang wrote:

So, I'd like to provide some patches for the wilc driver, but I'm
unclear what the most effective way to go about this is.

To submit the patches for wilc1000 mainlined driver, please send the
patches to linux-wireless mailing list. Have a look at *submitting
patch* section in wireless wiki to know about the patch submission process.

Please refer the below link:
https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/developers/documentation/submittingpatches

The driver in mainline (driver/net/wireless/microchip/wilc1000) only
seems to support WILC1000 (not WILC3000) and uses firmware:

  atmel/wilc1000_wifi_firmware-1.bin

whereas the linux-at91 driver (driver/staging/wilc1000) supports both
WILC1000 and WILC3000 and uses firmware

  mch/wilc1000_wifi_firmware.bin

(for WILC1000).

The WILC1000 15.4 firmware(wilc1000_wifi_firmware-1.bin) is available at
linux-firmware repo.

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git

Please use this firmware for your testing.

For the hardware I have (embedded system with WILC1000/SPI), the
mainline driver doesn't load, whereas the driver from linux-at91 does
load and work(mostly).

What error are you getting during driver loading. Could you please check
if FW file is available at "atmel/wilc1000_wifi_firmware-1.bin" path.

I'd really like to work off of mainline since it's much easier to track
things with a repository that's updated frequently, but it looks to me
like the mainline may be missing a lot of code that's already in
linux-at91.

What am I supposed to do?

The mainlined driver only support for WILC1000. WILC3000 chip(Wifi+BT
combo) support needs to be added. Earlier the wilc driver was part of
staging so adding new features were not encouraged but now new features
are welcome.
We need to port different features to the mainlined driver. Recently we
have added the support for WMM[1]. Similarly we need to add other
features(like wilc3000 support) to the mainline driver by following
kernel development guideline.

1. https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-wireless/msg205899.html

Regards,
Ajay