Re: [RFC] wimax: move out to staging

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 11:34 AM Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 10:20:13PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > From: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx>
> >
> > There are no known users of this driver as of October 2020, and it will
> > be removed unless someone turns out to still need it in future releases.
> >
> > According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WiMAX_networks, there
> > have been many public wimax networks, but it appears that these entries
> > are all stale, after everyone has migrated to LTE or discontinued their
> > service altogether.
>
> Wimax is still pretty common in Africa.  But you have to buy an outdoor
> antenae with all the software on it and an ethernet cable into your
> house.

Ah, good to know, thanks for the information. I'll include that when
I resend the patch, which I have to do anyway to avoid a small
regression. I did a look at a couple of African ISPs that seemed to
all have discontinued service, but I suppose I should have looked
more carefully.

>  I don't know what software the antennaes are using.  Probably
> Linux but with an out of tree kernel module is my guess.

Right, it seems very unlikely that they would be using the old
Intel drivers, and it's also unlikely that they are updating those
boxes to new kernels. I found a firmware image for Huawei
BM623m, which runs a proprietary kernel module for the wimax
stack on an MT7108 (arm926) phone chip running a
linux-2.6.26.8-rt16 kernel.

       Arnd