Re: [PATCH RFC] staging: Add driver to communicate with the T2 Security Chip

[Aditya Garg]

> On 9 Mar 2025, at 2:21 PM, gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Mar 09, 2025 at 08:44:16AM +0000, Aditya Garg wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>>> On 9 Mar 2025, at 2:10 PM, Aditya Garg <gargaditya08@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> 
>>> From: Paul Pawlowski <paul@xxxxxxxx>
>>> 
>>> This patch adds a driver named apple-bce, to add support for the T2
>>> Security Chip found on certain Macs.
>>> 
>>> The driver has 3 main components:
>>> 
>>> BCE (Buffer Copy Engine) - this is what the files in the root directory
>>> are for. This estabilishes a basic communication channel with the T2.
>>> VHCI and Audio both require this component.
>>> 
>>> VHCI - this is a virtual USB host controller; keyboard, mouse and
>>> other system components are provided by this component (other
>>> drivers use this host controller to provide more functionality).
>>> 
>>> Audio - a driver for the T2 audio interface, currently only audio
>>> output is supported.
>>> 
>>> Currently, suspend and resume for VHCI is broken after a firmware
>>> update in iBridge since macOS Sonoma.
>>> 
>>> Signed-off-by: Paul Pawlowski <paul@xxxxxxxx>
>>> Signed-off-by: Aditya Garg <gargaditya08@xxxxxxxx>
>>> 
>> 
>> FWIW, I am aware of the missing maintainers file and still not removed Linux version checks in the driver.
>> 
>> My main purpose of sending this was to know the views of the maintainers about the code quality, and whether this qualifies for staging or not.
> 
> I have to ask why do you want this in drivers/staging/ at all?  Why not
> take the day or so to clean up the code to be the proper style and
> handle the needed issues and then submit it to the normal part of the
> kernel?
> 
> Putting code in staging actually takes more work to clean it up and get
> it out of there than just doing it all at once out-of-tree.  So we need
> a good reason why it is in here, as well as what the plan is to get it
> out of staging entirely.  So a TODO file in the directory for the driver
> is required here.

I see. I was of the view that staging is more of like a place to keep beta drivers
> 
> Also, as this is at least 3 different drivers, this should be a patch
> series and not all in one if at all possible.
> 
> thanks,
> 
> greg k-h