Re: [PATCH] crypto: qce - Remove driver

[Bartosz Golaszewski]

On Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:22:41 +0200, Eric Biggers <ebiggers@xxxxxxxxxx> said:
> On Fri, Jul 24, 2026 at 08:51:44AM -0700, Eric Biggers wrote:
>> It is consuming a lot of the community's time to help maintain,
>> including dealing with LLM-found bugs, with no clear benefit to anyone.
>> Even considering *just today* we can see someone sent a bug fix:
>> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/20260724081537.191992-2-thorsten.blum@xxxxxxxxx/
>
> Another example:
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/d5de5a55-eb35-4ad5-8d53-12e188e156cb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
>
>> It definitely *was* causing problems before it was disabled via the
>> crypto priority system (which made it unused in the kernel) and dropped
>> it from AF_ALG (which removed most of the unprivileged attack surface).
>> When anyone accidentally used it, it caused at least a huge performance
>> problem, and sometimes other problems too like filesystem hangs.  It was
>> an issue for years.
>
> This actually seems to have been an overly-optimistic characterization!
> As per
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/d5de5a55-eb35-4ad5-8d53-12e188e156cb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
> this driver drains the battery on every system with the module loaded,
> even when no crypto requests are actually sent to it.
>

Are you seriously complaining about people sending fixes to a driver we want
to see fixed? We don't remove maintained drivers, this has been the kernel
policy for years. Unfortunately if we want to fix it, then it'll take some
work involving sending patches to the mailing list.

I think it's time for Herbert to decide before I respin any of the series in
progress.

Thanks,
Bartosz