Greg, folks, So the staging area of the Linux kernel has proven quite successful for a few drivers for 802.11 already. Otus [0] for example was rewritten completely first as ar9170 [1] and then carl9170 [2] even with open firmware, carl9170.fw [3] and then Otus got nuked. ath6kl [4] is another example, it got a lot of heavy handing on staging and then Kalle took over and decided to work on the tree outside of the kernel given that he was actually familiar with upstream requirements, he just needed a lot more freedom than what we allow for patches upstream to do a lot of heavy handing cleanup. So staging helps a lot with drivers that likely get a little attention or to help educate developers or vendors not used to upstream development, but for experienced upstream developers that don't need these lessons its a bit of a arm twister (although still good practice) to deal with the requirements of patches upstream for a huge cleanup. Granted keeping the history is good and important, specially if accepting patches and so on, but at least from what I'm seeing some 802.11 developers are preferring to do the staging outside of the Linux kernel. For both of these drivers then the main usage of staging was as immediate enablement for users given that otherwise other Linux distributions would cherry pick these drivers anyway and stable fixes for these users, but for development experienced 802.11 developers have used it only as a base to fork and do major overhauls. That was the case for both otus and ath6kl and from the looks of it it seems that the same is being preferred for the wcn36xx driver [5] which is a clean rewrite of prima driver [6]. There are also some drivers on my radar that I think might take similar approach, but not because they are crap but still because they are still real staging drivers. Despite these things some folks may want them. For example the Wilocity 60 GHz 802.11ad wil6210 [8] driver was desired just for monitor mode support as soon as that was supported and we wanted those folks to be able to get it through a unified, and yet upstream-prioritizing-friendly-fassion. Obviously no one runs the latest foo-next subsystem kernels unless you are a developer so we backport these drivers through compat-drivers [7]. For a while I accepted these drivers into compat-drivers as a patch under crap/ with the caveat that I'd kick them out after a kernel release or two if they were not upstream by then. The maintenance of such drivers proved painful, so I decided to kick them all out and push everyone to usptream ASAP. That worked for wil6210, now upstrea, but for the Ethernet alx driver [9], based on community feedback, still requires more work. The crux of the alx driver was to either go to staging or keep it externally for whatever reason. I was fan of just getting it under staging but at that point I started addressing driver code quality in general at corporations with Adrian [10] who works on FreeBSD. If we can address code quality at large from inception, from bring up code, then we'd all be in a better place. This experience has been very educational given that it has brought up general bring up considerations and timeline considerations for code and hardware. We have to separate all these. We are currently testing an idea to use a unified driver strategy for both FreeBSD and Linux under a unified driver git tree for both which would never put in compromise the upstream requirements for both. The idea is to do the staging development companies typically do on their end publicly and address their idea of unification *with* the community [11]. We chose alx given the simplicity of the driver but work is going slow there. While we give some time for that work to brew I have integrated it to compat-drivers by extracting code using a reference git tree, this lets the driver always have to deal with only linux-next being the target and we'd deal with the backporting through compat-drivers and compat. I will kick the alx driver out of compat-drivers though if we don't get any unification interest from FreeBSD though, but this experience has helped so far. The issue of staging and bring up still exists and another drivers is on the roadmap that is already sort of upstream quality but developers would prefer to do development outside of drivers/staging/ to simply address proper upstream as an ultimate objective given the major overhauls required still and given the developers involved are experienced upstream developers. The question of enablement to end users of that driver comes up and I now have to consider adding cherry picking drivers of that type to compat-drivers or simply asking for folks to wait until its upstream. This has me thinking if it makes sense to have an external driver tree for staging drivers but lead by engineers who already know the rules of upstream, they just want to get things done faster. Wanted to get your and the community's feedback on this. [0] http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/otus [1] http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ar9170 [2] http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/carl9170 [3] http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/carl9170.fw [4] http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ath6kl [5] https://github.com/KrasnikovEugene/wcn36xx [6] https://www.codeaurora.org/gitweb/external/wlan/?p=prima.git [7] https://backports.wiki.kernel.org [8] http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/wil6210 [9] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/alx [10] http://www.do-not-panic.com/2013/03/killing-proprietary-drivers-for-all.html [11] http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/unified-drivers Luis -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
