On Wed, Oct 11, 2023, at 10:44, Kalle Valo wrote: > "Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@xxxxxxxx> writes: >> On Wed, Oct 11, 2023, at 07:40, Kalle Valo wrote: >>> Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >>> >>> We (the wireless folks) have been talking about dropping legacy drivers >>> on and off for several years now. The problem is that we don't know >>> which of them work and which not, for example IIRC someone reported >>> recently that wl3501 still works. >>> >>> Personally I would be extremly happy to remove all the ancient drivers >>> as that reduces the amount of code for us to maintain but is that the >>> right thing to do for the users? I don't have an answer to that, >>> comments very welcome. >> >> I had a look at what openwrt enables, to see if any of the drivers >> in my RFC patch are actually enabled, if anything supports legacy >> embedded devices with these it would be openwrt. The good news here >> is that openwrt intentionally leaves WEXT disabled, and none of them >> are still in use. > > I don't think openwrt is a good metric in this case. These drivers are > for 20+ years old hardware, most likely running on really old x86 > laptops. So the chances of them running openwrt on those laptops is low > and I would expect them to run more traditional distros like debian or > ubuntu. But of course this is just guessing. OpenWRT is clearly not a good metric for laptops, but it's a good indicator for embedded systems, in particular those with wireless access points, and it does enable a lot of them (atheros, broadcom, intel, marvell, ralink, realtek, mt76, wlcore, rsi ...) depending on the platform. I can also see that it used to enable airo, p54, hermes, adm8211, zd1211, ipw2x00 and libertas but stopped this a year ago, see https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/a06e023b4e12 Arnd
