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

CC geoff, ppc

On Thu, Oct 12, 2023 at 4:46 PM Kalle Valo [off-list ref] wrote:

"Arnd Bergmann" [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

On Thu, Oct 12, 2023, at 13:47, Kalle Valo wrote:

quoted

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.

Awesome, thank you!

quoted

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 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.

Actually I would prefer to remove ipw2x00 and ps3-gelic-wireless as
well. I have not seen any evidence that there would be users for those
drivers. If we find out that there really are users I can easily add the
drivers back. The faster we get rid of wext the better, it really needs
to go away.

--
https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-wireless/list/

https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/developers/documentation/submittingpatches