The Staging Merge For Linux 3.2 Kernel Is Huge
Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the "big staging merge for 3.2" this morning to Linus. Greg writes, "there's a lot of patches in here, and the overall diff is quite impressive." There's some 103,718 lines of new code, but there is 230,262 lines of code that were removed from the tree. So while there is still lots of new code, it's actually a net decrease in the total number of lines of code.
The changes are attributed to several drivers being taken out of the Linux kernel staging area. The "ath6kl" driver, which is the open-source driver for the Atheros AR600x series of wireless chipsets, has been replaced by a better driver in the kernel's wireless tree. A Broadcom WiFi driver also made it out of staging. Microsoft's HyperV bus core code is also preparing to leave the kernel staging area.
The Broadcom WiFi drivers leaving the staging area is brcmfmac and brcmsmac. The brcmfmac is for the BCM4329 ASIC. Brcmsmac is the open-source bcrm80211 driver for the BCM4313 (0x4727), BCM43224 (0x0576 and 0x4353), and BCM43225 (0x4357) chips.
Some of the staging driver updates include changes to the Crystal HD, cx25821 (a Conexant driver for video surveillance), et131x (the Agere ET131x ethernet driver), the Intel Poulksbo/GMA500 driver, and rtl8192e (a Realtek WLAN chipset driver). The XGI frame-buffer (xgifb) driver has also received several thousand lines of updates. The XGI updates seem to be mostly fixes and other minor work, but nothing too exciting, especially as it's for the fb driver and not some magical KMS component. There's also a new Linux staging driver for the Realtek RTS5139 card-reader.
In total there are 1519 patches for the staging tree in the Linux 3.2 kernel merge window. You can read Greg's 3.2 staging merge request on the kernel mailing list.
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