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

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, 2023-10-12 at 16:36 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 12, 2023, at 13:47, Kalle Valo wrote:
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> 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 was only for CF cards of which there were a couple; I still have
cards but don't have a machine with CF anymore. USB/SDIO/SPI (as you
point out) have much higher usage.

ACK from me (if my historical libertas involvement counts for anything)
on removing Libertas CF support.

Dan

> 
> 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.
> 
>       Arnd
>