Fwd: Re: Anybody working on rtl8712?

[Kristina Martšenko]

On 21/06/14 21:24, Larry Finger wrote:
> On 06/21/2014 12:52 PM, Christian Lamparter wrote:
>> I think there's a reason why the development takes so long
>> (The RTL8192S* chips have been around since 2008, 2009)
>> and why we all have better things to do and write harsh
>> responses. As far as I can tell, It would be great if Realtek
>> could have a few dedicated devs, which take care of integrating
>> their own linux drivers into /drivers/net/wireless instead of
>> dumping it into /driver/staging.
>>
>> This might sounds like hobbyists wifi-devs are a bunch of *****.
>> However, other (wifi-)vendor (e.g.: Intel, Qualcom, TI, Broadcom
>> and Marvell) have been participating for some time now. And
>> their end-users are very happy as a result of this. Now, if only
>> Realtek would join the party; that would be "awesome".
> 
> OK, a little clarification seems to be necessary. First of all, I have
> no official connection with Realtek. I do not get paid, and I do not
> have any sort of NDA with them. In fact, I would refuse to sign one.
> What I know about the internals of their chips is derived from reading
> code that they publish.
> 
> At one point, I needed a Linux driver for a D-Link DWA-130. I took the
> Realtek driver, fixed the problems when running it on 64-bit hardware
> and on big-endian machines, and submitted it to staging as r8712u.
> Shortly thereafter, the PCI group at Realsil (the Chinese affiliate of
> Realtek) asked me if I would help them get their mac80211 drivers into
> the kernel. That group has been quite active in adapting their coding
> styles and practices to what is required for Linux.
> 
> The USB programming group is in Taiwan, and they are much less
> interested in getting their drivers into Linux. Unlike the PCIe group, I
> don't even get hardware from them. They did write rtl8192cu, but have
> not done much with it since. The drivers for newer chips can be built
> for FreeBSD, Windows, or Linux. In several cases, I have not even had
> the hardware, which makes it impossible to do much in the way of
> improvement other than stripping out the foreign code. Jes Sorensen of
> RedHat has taken on the maintenance of the RTL8723AU driver as he has
> that hardware. He is actively reworking it with tens of patches per
> week, but he has not yet tackled the conversion to mac80211. It should
> have much in common with the RTL8723AE, but it will still be a big job.
> 
> The PCI group recently sent me new code for all the PCI devices, and I
> am working at getting it merged into the wireless-testing tree. Once
> that is done, I plan to entice them to take over the maintainers role
> for those drivers.
> 
> What to do about the USB drivers is still an open question.

Thanks for taking the time to share what you know about the situation.
Really nice of you to put so much of your own time into these drivers
too. Maybe Realtek's USB group will come around, eventually...

Kristina