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    SubjectRe: [PATCH] [RFC] wireless: move obsolete drivers to staging
    On Wed, Oct 11, 2023, at 20:13, Philipp Hortmann wrote:
    > On 10/10/23 17:27, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
    >> From: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> While looking at the old drivers
    >> using the obsolete .ndo_do_ioctl() callback, I found a number of network
    >> drivers that are especially obsolete, in particular for 802.11b
    >> (11Mbit/s) or even older wireless networks, using non-busmaster
    >> ISA/PCMCIA style bus interfaces, and using the legacy wireless extension
    >> ioctls rather than the netlink interfaces that were meant to replace
    >> them in 2007. All of these drivers are obsolete or orphaned. We had
    >> previously discussed this topic, but nobody ever moved the files, so I
    >> now went through the list to my best knowledge. These are the drivers
    >> that I would classify as "probably unused" by now:
    >
    > I found a USB WLAN Stick with a rtl8192u. I got it last Saturday and
    > found out that the firmware is missing in my ubuntu 20.04. I found it on
    > the web and fixed it. When I started the driver my computer crashed. The
    > missing part was: priv->priv_wq = alloc_workqueue("priv_wq", 0, 0);
    > Fixing this the next error was a network = kzalloc(sizeof(*network),
    > GFP_KERNEL); in wrong context with leads to a crash of my computer.
    > Fixing this leads to another issue which lets my computer crash.
    >
    > For me the firmware of rtl8192u was intentionally missing because of the
    > issues with the driver.
    >
    > What this has to do with your question?
    > Can we check for missing firmware in main distributions to know which
    > drivers are considered to be old and unused?

    Nice, thanks so much for testing.

    I see the two bugs were introduced in 2016 by commit 1761a85c3bed3
    ("staging: rtl8192u: Remove create_workqueue()") and in 2021 by
    commit 061e390b7c87f ("staging: rtl8192u: ieee80211_softmac: Move a
    large data struct onto the heap"), so it's been broken for a while.

    I also checked rtl8192e for the same bugs, but that driver
    managed to avoid this even though it had the same code
    originally.

    Regarding the firmware files, I found:

    - rtl8192e, rtl7812 and rtl8723bs are all in the linux-firmware
    package, unlike rtl8192u

    - atmel firmware is not in upstream linux-firmware, but Debian
    has an atmel-firmware package for it

    - I could not find a Debian package for ks7010sd.rom

    - vt6656/vntwusb.fw is in firmware-misc-nonfree

    - orinoco has multiple firmware files, but only agere_sta_fw.bin
    and agere_ap_fw.bin are in Debian and linux-firmware.

    Arnd

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