On 10/11/2017 08:13 AM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 12:06:00PM +0300, Kalle Valo wrote:
(Sorry for taking so long with the reply, I wanted first to check what
the rtlwifi in staging contains.)
Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
On 08/24/2017 07:14 AM, Kalle Valo wrote:
Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Smatch is distrustful of the "capab" value and marks it as user
controlled. I think it actually comes from the firmware? Anyway, I
looked at other drivers and they added a bounds check and it seems like
a harmless thing to have so I have added it here as well.
Signed-off-by: Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@xxxxxxxxxx>
diff --git a/drivers/staging/rtlwifi/base.c b/drivers/staging/rtlwifi/base.c
index f7f207cbaee3..a30b928d5ee1 100644
--- a/drivers/staging/rtlwifi/base.c
+++ b/drivers/staging/rtlwifi/base.c
I'm getting slightly annoyed that we now apparently have two duplicate
rtlwifi drivers (with the same name!) and I'm being spammed by staging
patches. Was this really a smart thing to do? And what will be the
future of these two drivers?
(Of course this is not directed to Dan, he is just fixing bugs found by
smatch, but more like a general question.)
That was the decision that you and Greg made. The version in
wireless-drivers needs many patches to handle the new device. The
progress in applying these to wireless-drivers was very slow for many
reasons. Keeping a single version of that code would have required
coordination between you and Greg, which was discouraged.
I don't recall deciding anything, all I did was asking for more info
about the new code. I was against the idea since I first saw your mail
but I tried to be diplomatic and not shot it down immeadiately. Shows
that diplomacy is not really my thing...
We always take extra measures to avoid forking code, why is it now all
of sudden ok? Also this gives the wrong message to Realtek, and other
vendors, that they can just fork the driver and push all sort of crap to
staging.
So just to make clear to everyone: I think forking drivers like this is
a HORRIBLE idea and I do not want to have anything to do with that. If
schedule goes over quality then a much better approach is to move to the
whole driver to staging than to have duplicated drivers like we have
now.
I think it's horrid too. But, if no one is able to do the real work
here, we hurt users who just need to use their hardware to get things
done.
And it seems like the company isn't willing to do the real work, so
dumping this in staging is the best we can do at the moment.
However, if this causes you problems, that's not good at all either.
Getting "real" support for this hardware is key, and hopefully can
happen somehow. But fixing up the staging driver is almost never the
way to do it, as you know :)
So what to do? Any ideas? What makes your life easier? You can just
ignore the staging tree, as it should not affect your portion of the
kernel at all, right?
Greg and Kalle,
We can all agree that this situation is bad; however, several of the points made
in your E-mails need to be addressed.
First of all, I am not an employee of Realtek, and I have no knowledge of the
internals of any of their chips. I have never signed a non-disclosure agreement,
and the only thing that I have received from them are sample chips for testing.
My main interest is in helping the user experience. As there are a number of
users with the new RTL8822BE device, that meant getting an in-kernel driver to
them as soon as possible. As stated earlier, adding this particular device to
the rtlwifi family involved roughly 120K lines of new code. Given our recent
experience in getting code accepted into the wireless tree meant that this
additional code would not have been accepted for many months. For that reason,
we chose the staging route. It is important that we get this right as Realtek
tells me that there will be two additional new drivers in the coming 6 months.
As to the convergence of the rtlwifi code between staging and wireless, I
applied the 40 or 50 patches in my queue to the wireless version to create the
version that went into staging. If any of the current patches to wireless do not
seem to be in the staging version, sometimes temporary changes are necessary so
that the intermediate drivers will build and work. Yes, it is code churn, but
necessary to keep patches small. In keeping with Kalle's requests, only a
fraction of those patches have been submitted to him.
My intent is to have the RTL8822BE driver moved from staging to mainline no
later than 4.17. The affected drivers rtl_pci, rtlwifi and becoex will be moved
in that order. Of course, the required changes will need to be in wireless
before staging is changed, which will slow the process. As I see it, the switch
can only occur with a new version.
My opinion is that the company has gone a long ways toward meeting the
requirements of the Linux kernel. A lot of their code is written for Windows and
Linux, with emphasis on Windows, which complicates matters as not all of the
changes for Linux can be backported. Prior to the introduction of these drivers
in 2.6.38, drivers were released periodically as tar files with no information
regarding intermediate steps were recorded other than the SVN modification
number. At least now, we get relatively small changes.
I have been pleased and surprised at the stability and performance of the driver
in staging. Other than possible changes required by reviewers when it is moved,
it is ready for the wireless tree.
Finally, I have notified my Realtek contact that I do not plan to continue as
the maintainer of these drivers very much longer due to my age. I still have the
interest, but not always the energy. The people at Realtek have proposed a plan
that seems workable. Of course, there will be hiccups, but the current process
does not seem to be that smooth.
Larry
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