linux-kernel - Re: can we drop the comedi serial2002 drivers from staging?

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Date:   Mon, 18 Jun 2018 10:35:42 +0100
From:   Ian Abbott <abbotti@....co.uk>
To:     Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>
Cc:     H Hartley Sweeten <hsweeten@...ionengravers.com>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        Anders Blomdell <anders.blomdell@...trol.lth.se>
Subject: Re: can we drop the comedi serial2002 drivers from staging?

On 16/06/18 10:37, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 16, 2018 at 11:06:45AM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>> As far as I can tell there has been no targeted work on the driver
>> since merging it at all, and since 2014 even the comedi-wide
>> cleanups stopped, laving just drive by tree wide changes since.
>>
>> At the same time the driver badly abuses the tty layer and is one
>> of only two major abusers of the poll code for in-kernel waits.
> 
> Yeah, it's an ugly driver.  It should be rewritten to use the new serdev
> api instead of trying to open a tty device node from within the kernel.

I was thinking about that, but it looks tricky to use for a "normal" 
PC-based distro due to typical lack of device-tree support.

Another possibility is to support comedi drivers in userspace via CUSE, 
which would require a comedi-cuse interface library that user-space 
comedi drivers could link to similar to how kernel-mode comedi drivers 
link to the comedi core.

> I don't object to dropping it.  Ian and Hartley, do you know of any
> users of this driver anymore?

The only place I know it was in use was in Anders Blomdell's lab at Lund 
University.  I've added him to the Cc: list.

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