On 06/21/2014 12:52 PM, Christian Lamparter wrote:
On Saturday, June 21, 2014 06:45:07 PM Kristina Martšenko wrote:
On 20/06/14 23:52, Christian Lamparter wrote:
On Friday, June 20, 2014 09:19:07 PM Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:
Kristina wrote:
I'm helping Greg do a bit of cleanup in the staging tree. I noticed that
nobody seems to have worked towards moving rtl8712 out of staging in
over a year. Are there any plans to clean it up and move it out soon?
Because otherwise we're going to have to delete the driver, as we don't
want staging to become a permanent place for unfinished code.
Christian Lamparter <chunkeey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> is working on a new driver
based on mac80211: https://github.com/chunkeey/rtl8192su
Thanks for pointing that out and forwarding the email to Christian.
rtl8192su development is chugging along. It just doesn't take place on
driverdev list. The driver reached "feature parity" with rtl8192cu for
some time ago.
Great, thanks for letting me know. If you plan to keep working on it, do
you think it would be a good idea to add yourself and a link to your
github to the staging driver's TODO file? That way people who find it
and want to work on it can join your effort, instead of starting their own.
Actually, this is already happening. I get mails about rtl8192su. So,
people who are interested are definitely following the development.
However the hurdles for rtl8192su driver are quite high
(3.15+ kernel [1]). This is due to the driver being based on rtlwifi
framework (the devices shares a lot of common code with the
rtl8192SE - the pcie version). The development takes place on
top of wireless-testing.git, so it can be merged with the rest of
the drivers.
(If someone is interested in the details: how a wireless drivers are
mainlined. There's a nifty process plan right here: [0] - check it out!).
(NB: my stance on the TODO: Leave it the way it is. After all, you want
those free checkpatch.pl and smatch/sparse fixes, right?)
But as with rtl8192cu, I would recommend adding just a friendly "printk".
I'm not sure what printk you're referring to.
I think there's a reason why the development takes so long
(The RTL8192S* chips have been around since 2008, 2009)
and why we all have better things to do and write harsh
responses. As far as I can tell, It would be great if Realtek
could have a few dedicated devs, which take care of integrating
their own linux drivers into /drivers/net/wireless instead of
dumping it into /driver/staging.
This might sounds like hobbyists wifi-devs are a bunch of *****.
However, other (wifi-)vendor (e.g.: Intel, Qualcom, TI, Broadcom
and Marvell) have been participating for some time now. And
their end-users are very happy as a result of this. Now, if only
Realtek would join the party; that would be "awesome".
OK, a little clarification seems to be necessary. First of all, I have no
official connection with Realtek. I do not get paid, and I do not have any sort
of NDA with them. In fact, I would refuse to sign one. What I know about the
internals of their chips is derived from reading code that they publish.
At one point, I needed a Linux driver for a D-Link DWA-130. I took the Realtek
driver, fixed the problems when running it on 64-bit hardware and on big-endian
machines, and submitted it to staging as r8712u. Shortly thereafter, the PCI
group at Realsil (the Chinese affiliate of Realtek) asked me if I would help
them get their mac80211 drivers into the kernel. That group has been quite
active in adapting their coding styles and practices to what is required for Linux.
The USB programming group is in Taiwan, and they are much less interested in
getting their drivers into Linux. Unlike the PCIe group, I don't even get
hardware from them. They did write rtl8192cu, but have not done much with it
since. The drivers for newer chips can be built for FreeBSD, Windows, or Linux.
In several cases, I have not even had the hardware, which makes it impossible to
do much in the way of improvement other than stripping out the foreign code. Jes
Sorensen of RedHat has taken on the maintenance of the RTL8723AU driver as he
has that hardware. He is actively reworking it with tens of patches per week,
but he has not yet tackled the conversion to mac80211. It should have much in
common with the RTL8723AE, but it will still be a big job.
The PCI group recently sent me new code for all the PCI devices, and I am
working at getting it merged into the wireless-testing tree. Once that is done,
I plan to entice them to take over the maintainers role for those drivers.
What to do about the USB drivers is still an open question.
Larry
_______________________________________________
devel mailing list
devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://driverdev.linuxdriverproject.org/mailman/listinfo/driverdev-devel
