I am worried about the future of the mwifiex driver. NXP has an ongoing effort of forking the driver to support their new chips, but the forked driver lacks support for the old chips supported by the current mwifiex driver. Overall this leaves us and our customers using the mwifiex driver in a very bad situation. Johannes made clear that he is not going to merge a driver that is 70% identical to the existing driver and on the other hand the existing driver doesn't get forward due to its odd-fixes state and the potential rise of a new driver which would render work on the existing driver useless. I think part of the solution should be that we start cleaning up the mwifiex driver so that at one point it could a) be a robust base for a fork, or b) make the fork unnecessary This would help people using the mwifiex driver to get a better support for their hardware. It would also help NXP by splitting the necessary changes into easier swallowable parts that are actually reviewable. Should we really need a fork at some point then much of the review would have already been done. I have a series here [1] doing some cleanup work which I'd still like to get forward. Johannes made some remarks in [2] and [3] on which parts of the driver need cleanup. Some more things for cleanup can also be found in the forked driver code. I am willing to put more work into the driver in creating and also reviewing and testing patches, but I would need some path forward for the driver and I think this needs a commitment from NXP to take the detour over the mwifiex driver to get their stuff upstream. Any thoughts? [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-wireless/87ldwyumvq.fsf@xxxxxxxxxx/ [2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/57ff2078632d8f14ca73c8307dc43585b3d09f50.camel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/#r [2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/5f5c42585e168e252a5fa3f43325aaa360f6d27a.camel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ -- Pengutronix e.K. | | Steuerwalder Str. 21 | http://www.pengutronix.de/ | 31137 Hildesheim, Germany | Phone: +49-5121-206917-0 | Amtsgericht Hildesheim, HRA 2686 | Fax: +49-5121-206917-5555 |
