On 12/22/2023 6:10 AM, Hector Martin wrote:
On 2023/12/21 18:57, Arend van Spriel wrote:- SHA-cyfmac-dev-list@xxxxxxxxxxxx On 12/21/2023 1:49 AM, Hector Martin wrote:On 2023/12/21 4:36, Arend van Spriel wrote:On 12/20/2023 7:14 PM, Hector Martin wrote:On 2023/12/20 19:20, Kalle Valo wrote:Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:Just recently a patch was posted to remove the Infineon list from MAINTAINERS because that company cares so little they have literally stopped accepting emails from us. Meanwhile they are telling their customers that they do not recommend upstream brcmfmac and they should use their downstream driver [1].Unquestionably broadcom is not helping maintain things, and I think it should matter. As Hector says, they point to their random driver dumps on their site that you can't even download unless you are a "Broadcom community member" or whatever, and hey - any company that works that way should be seen as pretty much hostile to any actual maintenance and proper development.Sadly this is the normal in the wireless world. All vendors focus on the latest generation, currently it's Wi-Fi 7, and lose interest on older generations. And vendors lose focus on the upstream drivers even faster, usually after a customer project ends. So in practise what we try to do is keep the drivers working somehow on our own, even after the vendors are long gone. If we would deliberately allow breaking drivers because vendor/corporations don't support us, I suspect we would have sevaral broken drivers in upstream.If Daniel and Hector are responsive to actual problem reports for the changes they cause, I do think that should count a lot.Sure, but they could also respect to the review comments. I find Arend's proposal is reasonable and that's what I would implement in v2. We (linux-wireless) make abstractions to workaround firmware problems or interface conflicts all the time, just look at ath10k for example. I would not be surprised if we need to add even more abstractions to brcmfmac in the future. And Arend is the expert here, he has best knowledge of Broadcom devices and I trust him. Has anyone even investigated what it would need to implement Arend's proposal? At least I don't see any indication of that.Of course we can implement it (and we will as we actually got a report of this patch breaking Cypress now, finally). The question was never whether it could be done, we're already doing a bunch of abstractions to deal with just the Broadcom-only side of things too. The point I was trying to make is that we need to *know* what firmware abstractions we need and *why* they are needed. We can't just say, for every change, "well, nobody knows if the existing code works or not, so let's just add an abstraction just in case the change breaks something". As far as anyone involved in the discussions until now could tell, this code was just something some Cypress person dumped upstream, and nobody involved was being responsive to any of our inquiries, so there was no way to be certain it worked at all, whether it was supported in public firmware, or anything else. *Now* that we know the existing code is actually functional and not just dead/broken, and that the WSEC approach is conversely not functional on the Cypress firmwares, it makes sense to introduce an abstraction.Just a quick look in the git history could have told you that it was not just dumped upstream and at least one person was using it and extended it for 802.11r support (fast-roaming): author Paweł Drewniak <czajernia@xxxxxxxxx> 2021-08-24 23:13:30 +0100 committer Kalle Valo <kvalo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 2021-08-29 11:33:07 +0300 commit 4b51de063d5310f1fb297388b7955926e63e45c9 (patch) tree ba2ccb5cbd055d482a8daa263f5e53531c07667f /drivers/net/wireless/broadcom/brcm80211/brcmfmac/cfg80211.c parent 81f9ebd43659320a88cae8ed5124c50b4d47ab66 (diff) download wireless-4b51de063d5310f1fb297388b7955926e63e45c9.tar.gz brcmfmac: Add WPA3 Personal with FT to supported cipher suites This allows the driver to connect to BSSIDs supporting SAE with 802.11r. Tested on Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (STA) and UniFi 6LR/OpenWRT 21.02.0-rc2. AP was set to 'sae-mixed' (WPA2/3 Personal). Signed-off-by: Paweł Drewniak <czajernia@xxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Kalle Valo <kvalo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210824221330.3847139-1-czajernia@xxxxxxxxxSure, but we also had user reports of it *not* actually working (maybe it regressed?). We didn't know whether it was functional with the linux-firmware blobs in any way, I wanted confirmation of that. And we also didn't know that the patch *would* break it at all; perhaps the Cypress firmware had also grown support for the WSEC mechanism. That's why I wanted someone to actually confirm the code worked (in some subset of cases) and the patch didn't, before starting to introduce conditionals. There is, of course, also the element that the Cypress side has been long unmaintained, and if nobody is testing/giving feedback/complaining, perhaps it's better to err on the side of maybe breaking something and see if that gets someone to come out of the woodwork if it really breaks, rather than tiptoeing around the code without knowing what's going on and without anyone actually testing things.That is because you distrust the intent that Cypress was really contributing. They were and I trusted them to not just throw in a feature like WPA3. When Infineon took over they went mute. Upon reviewing your patch (again) I also sent an email to them asking specifically about the status of the sae_password interface. I did not use the mailing list which indeed bounces these days (hence removed them) but the last living soul that I had contact with about a year ago whether they were still comitted to be involved. I guess out of politeness or embarrassment I got confirmation they were and never heard from him again. The query about the sae_password interface is still pending.If only corporate acquisition politics didn't repeatedly throw a wrench into this one... :/ This is where we are though, Infineon clearly doesn't care, so it's time to move on.It's not about this *specific* patch, it's about the general situation of not being able to touch firmware interfaces "just in case Cypress breaks" being unsustainable in the long term. I wasn't pushing back because I think this particular one will be hard, I was pushing back because I can read the tea leaves and see this is not going to end well if it's the approach we start taking for everything. We *need* someone to be testing patches on Cypress, we can't just "try not to touch it" and cross our fingers. That just ends in disaster, we are not going to succeed in not breaking it either way and it's going to make the driver worse.I admire you ability of reading tea leaves. You saw the Grim I reckon. Admittedly your responses on every comment from my side (or Kalle for that matter) was polarizing every discussion. That is common way people treat each other nowadays especially online where a conversation is just a pile of text going shit. It does not bring out the best in me either, but it was draining every ounce of energy from me so better end it by stepping out.The hilariously outdated kernel development model surely doesn't help either (I've stated my opinion on this quite a few times if you've followed around) ;)
It is not a fair statement to call the kernel development process outdated. It is a vast code base that needs agreed upon steps to keep it rolling as it is. Attend a plumbers conference or collaboration summit or better become a speaker and vent all your opinions there and have a discussion with community members. They are held yearly and maybe over the past years things have been introduced that give more churn than value and that would be a great topic for discussion. However, it is better left outside of the development workflow.
This stuff gets *really* frustrating when you're trying to improve what is, I hope we can all admit, an undermaintained driver (that is not to say it's anyone's fault personally), and end up getting held back due to everything from coding style nitpicks to people not having the time to be responsive. It's just not helpful. It's important to know when to step aside and let people actually get stuff done. When Daniel started sending me brcmfmac patches downstream, I took a look at a few of them, decided he knew what he was doing, and just started pulling in his branches wholesale. Was it perfect? No, I had to debug at least one regression at one point. But it took me less time to do that than it would've to go through the commits with a fine toothed comb, so it was clearly the right decision.
With the patch that started it all I simply had another view based on trusting my peers. Infineon has been pulling away from brcmfmac off the bat, but Cypress was serious enough about the driver not to drop a heap of dung on it. Based on that I felt regressions would be around the corner if we took it as is.
That is not to say that should be the standard upstream (we make a point of moving fast and breaking things more downstream, since it's a proving ground for what eventually will be upstreamed), but I think it does demonstrate the kind of delegation ability that is sorely lacking in many drivers and subsystems in the kernel these days. Maintainers become entrenched in their position, long beyond the point where they have the time/motivation/ability to drive the code forward, and end up in the way of new people who are trying to make a difference. I think Linus knows full well the kernel maintainer community is stagnating. That doesn't mean people should step down entirely. But it does mean they need to recognize when this is happening and, at least, proactively try to bring new people in, instead of just continuing to play a gatekeeping role. The role of maintainers should not be that of a wall people have to climb over to get their changes in, it should be to guide new contributors and help onboard people who can contribute, as peers and eventually as future maintainers. Kalle, in the other thread you said "this is not fun anymore, this is more like a business with requirements and demands coming from everywhere.". That's what it feels like to us when our changes get rejected because the local vars aren't in reverse Christmas tree order, or because our commit messages have "v2:" in them. It feels like some manager is trying to justify their position by creating busywork for everyone else. Nobody should actually care about any of those things, and if they do, they need to step back and really ask themselves how they ended up believing that. If the goal is to enforce a reasonable shared coding style so things don't spiral into chaos, FFS, let's just do what every other project does these days and adopt clang-format. Then *all* of us can stop wasting time on these trivialities and go back to getting stuff done. And really, nobody cares about commit messages as long as the tags are right, the subject line is succinct, and the important information is in there. Extra stuff never hurt anyone.
https://docs.kernel.org/process/clang-format.html#clangformat Enjoy!!
I added the ground work for multi-vendor support, but have not decided on the approach to take. Abstract per firmware interface primitive or simply have a cfg80211.c and fwil_types.h per vendor OR implement a vendor-specific cfg80211 callback and override the default callback during the driver attach, ie. in brcmf_fwvid_wcc_attach(). The latter duplicates things, but lean towards that as it may be easier on the long-term. What do your tea leaves tell you ;-)FWIW, I was hoping you'd stay on at least as a reviewer. Your contributions are valuable. You obviously know the driver and hardware much better than most people. I encourage you to, at least, post a v2 of the MAINTAINERS patch with yourself as an R: line. As far as the actual driver abstraction architecture, I'm going to leave it to Daniel to decide what makes the most sense, since he's the one introducing new mechanisms for that already. There's always room for refactoring later though, depending on the direction things take with the vendor split. BTW, clang-format also makes refactoring a lot less painful ;)
Refactoring a single driver is not so painful, but rather a nice relaxing puzzle ;-)
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