Re: On brcm80211 maintenance and support

[Phil Elwell]

Hi everyone,

On Tue, 10 Oct 2023 at 15:53, Neal Gompa <neal@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> * Spam *
> On Sat, Oct 7, 2023 at 8:51 AM Hector Martin <marcan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On 07/10/2023 00.48, Dmitry Antipov wrote:
> > > On 10/6/23 18:34, Hector Martin wrote:
> > >
> > >> For better or worse, if nobody else does, I'm willing to sign up to
> > >> maintain the chips shipping on Apple ARM64 machines (i.e. BCM4378,
> > >> BCM4387, BCM4388 - that last one I have bringup for downstream, just got
> > >> it done this week) and partially BCM4377 as a bonus (since I have access
> > >> to an older Intel Mac with that one, and already did bringup for it,
> > >> though my access is sporadic). I'm already playing part time maintainer
> > >> anyway (other folks have already sent us patches I'll have to upstream),
> > >> and we need this driver to keep working and continue to support new chips.
> > >
> > > Good news. Would you capable to consider some generic (not hooked to any
> > > particular hardware) things like [1] ?
> > >
> > > [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-wireless/20230703162458.155942-1-dmantipov@xxxxxxxxx/
> > >
> >
> > Sure, I've done cleanup type stuff myself too.
> >
>
> Can we please get this done so that the pile of Broadcom patches can
> actually start landing again? It's been frustrating watching patch
> submissions be ignored for over a year now. At least add Hector as a
> co-maintainer and allow him to land stuff people have been using
> outside to get Broadcom Wi-Fi to *work*.
>
> Having stuff sit on the pile and be *ignored* is frustrating for
> contributors and users, and massively disincentivizes people from
> working in upstream Linux.

This is just a quick note to say that Raspberry Pi obviously has a
vested interest in the future of the brcmfmac driver. In our
downstream tree we use the upstream driver largely unmodified - there
are a handful of patches that tinker around the edges, the largest of
which is in the area of firmware location and being phased out - no
patches from Infineon/Cypress, Synaptics or Broadcom.

We're very much WiFi users as opposed to WiFi developers, but if
there's something useful we can contribute then please speak up and
I'll see what we can do.

Phil