Hi Sascha, On Mon, Mar 03, 2025 at 12:05:26PM +0100, Sascha Hauer wrote: > 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. [...] > I have a series here [1] doing some cleanup work which I'd still like to > get forward. [...] > [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-wireless/87ldwyumvq.fsf@xxxxxxxxxx/ I'll apologize for that one stalling out a bit. IIRC, 11 of 12 patches looked great, but I got stuck on the "fix MAC address handling" patch, because it's a lot tougher to guarantee it doesn't break some use cases while fixing things. But really, it's probably mostly a bandwidth thing for me, as I really don't have many cycles to spend on things (and especially when it gets beyond "obvious cleanup" and requires substantial testing and/or reasoning). > Any thoughts? In no particular order: 1. even if NXP (or you, or anyone) does great work, I'm not going to be a super helpful maintainer. I simply don't have time to review and test substantial contributions. 2. I get the feeling linux-wireless may have problems like #1 in general. Johannes can't fill the entire gap Kalle left, for one. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong! Or if other excellent people have stepped up on review/maintenance.) 3. Other drivers may look somewhat similar, and yet fork for good reasons (like, firmware API revisions; or 802.11 generations; or some cross-section of both). I'm looking at rtw88/rtw89 (that I was involved with quite a bit), or ath10k/ath11k/ath12k/(have we made it to 13 yet?). So forking even with quite a bit of similarity isn't necessarily inherently wrong. 4. A key difference between #3 and mwifiex is, like you say, that mwifiex has a pretty low quality baseline. If I were maintaining it from the beginning, I probably wouldn't have accepted it. 5. I'm open to good people stepping up to fill in #1 -- i.e., include more maintainers that have a stake in larger contributions. Frankly, my only motivation here is to ensure that existing hardware supported by mwifiex doesn't get worse. So all in all, I think I probably agree with you. But speaking openly, I don't think I can be a large part of the solution here. Regards, Brian
