Hi,
On 18-01-17 17:55, Justin Forbes wrote:
On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 8:28 AM, Hans de Goede <hdegoede@xxxxxxxxxx <mailto:hdegoede@xxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Hi,
On 18-01-17 13:10, Josh Boyer wrote:
<snip>
rtl8723bs
rtl8189es
rtl8189fs
esp8089
xradio
And in the future possible others (rda599x comes to mind)
and I simply do not have the bandwidth to get 1 one of
these let alone all of these into staging, let alone
fully mainlined.
Currently we're crippling our user experience by refusing
to ship drivers support this hardware even though there are
fully open drivers to support these.
Hans, I think you need to take a deep breath. You seem to have come
to this discussion with fully loaded guns blazing.
Nobody has refused your request. There's been a discussion about the
best way to get it upstream. Nobody has said no.
Also, I understand your argumentation about user experience but this
is the first I've heard of this issue and I couldn't find any reports
of this in bugzilla. While it isn't relevant to the decision to add
the drivers, I do wonder how many users we have of such hardware.
The rtl8723bs driver is needed for a lot (I guesstimate over half of all
models) baytrail / cherrytrail hardware out there, as well as quite a few
ARM boards.
The rtl8189es, rtl8189fs and xradio drivers are necessary for wifi support on
the relatively popular orangepi ARM boards (different variants use a different
wifi chip).
Currently AFAIK most orangepi users are using armbian, because that comes
with a patches kernel adding support for various peripherals of which wifi
is the most prominent for headless use cases (and unfortunatelt the one with the
least progress upstream).
The esp8089 is mainly found in some Allwinner ARM tablets (which can run
mainline), it needs some work to the mmc core which needs to be mainlined
first; and of all drivers it actually has the clearest path to get into
mainline as free-electrons is working on mainlining it.
> It seems we aren't crippling user experience as much as we would be
making it possible to use the hardware in the first place. That could
certainly be a good thing.
Ack.
<snip>
> And I still end up at my original unanswered question:
"All I'm asking from the fedora kernel team is permission
to add the driver."
I believe you also offered to maintain it, yes?
Yes, if I get to go ahead to add these I will take care of them
100%, which is also why I want to start with just rtl8723bs and
see how that goes.
As said the Fedora kernel team can just comment out the patches
when things break when rebasing to a new rc1, and I will take
care of getting things fixed. Note if things break in a minor
release e.g. going from 4.8.15 to 4.8.16 a heads-up of course
would be appreciated, but I assume that is common sense.
I spent a bit of time considering this yesterday, and honestly couldn't find a workable solution outside of adding them to the kernel. Being network drivers, it would be hard to put them elsewhere. I really don't like taking them without a definite upstream path in site. We appreciate that you are willing to maintain them, so go ahead and add them. We will give you a heads up if we find anything with them.
Ok, thank you!
Bastien I would like to start with adding the rtl8723bs driver
(which we can hopefully drop soon again, assuming getting it
into mainline-staging works out). Is that ok with you ?
Regards,
Hans
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