Linux 5.19's Staging Spring Cleaning: ~13k Lines Of Code Removed

Along with his other pull requests for areas of the kernel he oversees, Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday submitted all of the staging area changes for the kernel in this "proving grounds" of sorts for the kernel. Thanks to some spring cleaning, the staging area is 13k lines of code less this cycle.

One of the biggest changes for staging this cycle is the WFX driver promoted out of staging. WFX is the Silicon Labs WiFi Linux driver. The Silicon Labs WF200 series hardware is intended for low-power IoT hardware applications. The WFX driver had been in staging for the past three years (since Linux 5.5) while now has finally been worked into good enough shape for promoting it to the networking subsystem proper.

Another 5k+ lines of code was freed up by removing the Unisys s-Par driver code from the kernel tree entirely. The Unisys s-Par code contained three drivers for the "Unisys Secure Partition" but this code has been left in an unmaintained state. No one from Unisys has responded to patches posted nor have any of their engineers furthered this code along at all in recent times, so the decision was made to just remove it from the Linux kernel. Unisys Secure Partitioning "s-Par" is a Type 1 hypervisor that makes use of Intel VT on select Xeon platforms to create and monitor multiple operating environments. The s-Par is implemented in firmware for low-overhead handling.

There also continues being a lot of code refinements to the Realtek RTL8188eus WiFi Linux driver, the "r8188eu". Greg commented of that r8188eu driver work, "So many cleanups. It's amazing just how many things have been cleaned up here, and yet, how many remain to go. Lots of work happened here, and it doesn't look to slow down any time soon."

There are a ton of other smaller driver clean-ups as outlined in the staging pull request.