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

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Message-Id: <f5243ad9-0e7d-4a2f-b944-a45c41330aaf@app.fastmail.com>
Date:   Wed, 11 Oct 2023 11:01:25 +0200
From:   "Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@...db.de>
To:     "Kalle Valo" <kvalo@...nel.org>
Cc:     "Greg Kroah-Hartman" <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        "Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@...nel.org>,
        "Alexandre Belloni" <alexandre.belloni@...tlin.com>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-staging@...ts.linux.dev,
        linux-wireless@...r.kernel.org,
        "Claudiu Beznea" <claudiu.beznea@...on.dev>,
        "Pavel Machek" <pavel@....cz>, "Jakub Kicinski" <kuba@...nel.org>,
        "David S . Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>,
        linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org,
        "Larry Finger" <Larry.Finger@...inger.net>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] [RFC] wireless: move obsolete drivers to staging

On Wed, Oct 11, 2023, at 10:44, Kalle Valo wrote:
> "Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@...db.de> writes:
>> On Wed, Oct 11, 2023, at 07:40, Kalle Valo wrote:
>>> Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org> writes:
>>>
>>> We (the wireless folks) have been talking about dropping legacy drivers
>>> on and off for several years now. The problem is that we don't know
>>> which of them work and which not, for example IIRC someone reported
>>> recently that wl3501 still works.
>>>
>>> Personally I would be extremly happy to remove all the ancient drivers
>>> as that reduces the amount of code for us to maintain but is that the
>>> right thing to do for the users? I don't have an answer to that,
>>> comments very welcome.
>>
>> I had a look at what openwrt enables, to see if any of the drivers
>> in my RFC patch are actually enabled, if anything supports legacy
>> embedded devices with these it would be openwrt. The good news here
>> is that openwrt intentionally leaves WEXT disabled, and none of them
>> are still in use.
>
> I don't think openwrt is a good metric in this case. These drivers are
> for 20+ years old hardware, most likely running on really old x86
> laptops. So the chances of them running openwrt on those laptops is low
> and I would expect them to run more traditional distros like debian or
> ubuntu. But of course this is just guessing.

OpenWRT is clearly not a good metric for laptops, but it's a good
indicator for embedded systems, in particular those with wireless
access points, and it does enable a lot of them
(atheros, broadcom, intel, marvell, ralink, realtek, mt76, wlcore,
rsi ...) depending on the platform.

I can also see that it used to enable airo, p54, hermes, adm8211,
zd1211, ipw2x00 and libertas but stopped this a year ago, see
https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/a06e023b4e12

     Arnd