Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On 10/11/2017 08:13 AM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: > >> On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 12:06:00PM +0300, Kalle Valo wrote: >> 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. And you are doing a great job at that! My only gripe here is forking the driver. > 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. If there are new drivers coming in 6 months they should submitting patches already now, this is my main point. Don't work in a waterfall model, release early and release often. > 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. Great to hear that you will be working on that. But yeah, that's quite an effort. IMHO a lot more work than if you would be working only with drivers/net/wireless. > As I see it, the switch can only occur with a new version. Yeah, we need to be very careful with the switch so that we don't break existing setups. > 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. I think all vendors had these huge OS agnostic drivers before: TI, Atheros/QCA etc. So it's not really a new thing and still most of the companies have been able to adapt one way or another. > 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. Yes, the changes might be small but to me it seems Realtek still dumps them in one big release. That's the problem here. > 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. Sorry to hear that you are stepping down as the maintainer but it's undertandable as you have had so much work to do. But I hope you still stick around. -- Kalle Valo
