Hi Corinna, On 16/01/2023 10:53, Corinna Vinschen wrote: > Hi Hans, > > I only learned about this yesterday, so I hope I'm not too late. > > Please don't do that. You're about to remove working drivers used by a > lot of people. > > If you remove them from the Linux kernel, you will leave *lots* of DVB-C > and DVB-S card users behind. They will update their TV recording > machines to a newer system at one point and suddenly their ability to > record from TV is gone forever. > > I'm personally affected by this as well. We're using a machine with > four Technotrend S2-3200 Budget DVB-S2 cards for TV recordings using > the VDR package. This card is apparently handled by the code under > drivers/staging/media/deprecated/saa7146. > > If this code goes away, we will have to keep the machine running on > an old kernel for a long time. > > I'm fortunate that I even learned about this developement, being a > developer myself, but how's a normal user to know that a Linux driver > they are using every day is about to be removed from the kernel? Again, > please don't break the equipment of us users of these DVB-C and DVB-S > cards for the future. I've dropped the PR for now. Is the concern specifically for the saa7146 based hardware? I.e., from Red Hat's point of view, are there any concerns about removing vpfe_capture, tm6000, zr364xx, stkwebcam, fsl-viu, cpia2 and meye? The core problem with saa7146 (and the other deprecated drivers) is that it is using the old videobuf framework, which has known problems and we want (need!) to get rid of it, either by dropping drivers or converting them. One partial solution would be to drop analog video support from saa7146, since that's the bit that uses this framework. DVB would remain working, but analog video support would die, unless someone steps up to do the conversion from vb1 to vb2. So support for the old MXB, Hexium Gemini and Hexium Orion would die, but for the other DVB devices it would stay alive. I'm honestly quite surprised that these old DVB PCI cards are still in use, I did not expect that. Regards, Hans
