rt2860 driver (fc11)

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 15:20 -0400, Kyle McMartin wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 08:15:59PM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> > >> > I had the same confusion. So there are 3 drivers around: The vendor
> > >> > driver, the staging driver which is a fork of the vendor driver and
> > >> > the serialmonkey driver.  Multiply that by 3 for rt2860, rt2870 and
> > >> > rt3070. And this leads to another confusion. Do (or will) the Fedora
> > >> > kernels have these staging drivers compiled by default? If that's the
> > >> > case and if the staging driver is as stable as the original vendor
> > >> > driver, I won't have to maintain those kmods anymore.
> > >>
> > >> The fedora kernel developers have always stated that the
> > >> staging/vendor drivers will never get enabled. Only once the other
> > >> ones are ready will they be turned on.
> > >>
> > >
> > > No we haven't, we've stated that they'll be enabled if someone steps up
> > > to the plate to make an active contribution to maintenance and
> > > improvements.
> > >
> > > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KernelStagingPolicy
> > 
> > Sorry, hadn't seen that. Was basing it on the comment in this bug
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=463111
> > 
> 
> Yeah, the wireless drivers are "special" since the vendor drivers, as
> stated elsewhere, usually supply their own entire 802.11 stack and other
> ugliness. I don't want to speak for John, but I suspect if someone
> stepped up to maintain a staging wireless driver in the interim, he
> wouldn't object.

I'm pretty much going to WONTFIX any bugs that show up for
wpa_supplicant and NetworkManager that have anything to do with staging
drivers.  If the drivers were actually in the kernel (and no, staging
isn't really "in the kernel" because they are TAINT_CRAP) then yes, I'd
care, because the driver has passed a quality bar.  None of the staging
drivers have done that, and most staging wireless drivers are likey
*never* to.

Part of that quality bar includes (a) using cfg80211, and (b) using
mac80211.  If they do that, they get all the nice bug fixes and
attention that upstream kernel provides.  If a staging driver with a
future (ie, ar9170/otus, at76_usb) shows up, then yeah, I'll care.

But if you're only doing "maintenance" on a staging driver, you're
almost certainly not porting it mac80211 and cfg80211 (otherwise you'd
actually be "developing" it, not just doing maintenance).  Thus your
effort is mostly pointless.

Dan