Linux's Latest Plan For Removing Old WiFi Drivers

In addition to old and unmaintained Ethernet driver code set for removal, there is an effort underway to clear out some obsolete and orphaned WiFi drivers from the Linux kernel.

Laid out earlier this month were some initial ideas on dropping very old WiFi drivers and that work is now progressing with a more concrete plan shared on Monday.

Arnd Bergmann posted the latest mailing list thread with an idea for the drivers to remove. If there ends up being anyone actively using the mainline Linux kernel with these drivers, the individual reverts can later happen to restore the driver support. His proposal also is for the removal patches to land in net-next after Linux 6.7-rc1 to allow for maximum time for exposure, which would mean not mainlining the code until the Linux 6.8 kernel cycle.

The plan is to kill off all PCMCIUA WiFi drivers as well as all WEXT users within drivers/net/wireless. Compared to the prior discussions, the PlayStation3 GELIC wireless driver would be kept around along with the staging drivers. See this LKML thread for the latest on the discussion over dropping very old WiFi drivers.

Removing the old PCMCIA WiFi drivers and other old wireless code would lighten the mainline Linux kernel by around 87.7k lines of code.