Linux 6.10 Staging Drops Broken & Unused Drivers To Remove 19k L.O.C.

In addition to the Linux 6.10 USB changes and char/misc with the new NTSYNC driver, Greg Kroah-Hartman on Wednesday also sent out the staging updates for Linux 6.10. There isn't much in the way of new code but some 19k lines of code removed thanks to removing an unused driver as well as a broken driver.

Linux 6.10 is removing the wlan-ng/PRISM2_USB driver. The wlan-ng prism 2.5/3 USB driver was for "a wide range of old USB wireless devices" but the driver has been unmaintained and the code apparently broken since 2021. With no one stepping up to maintain this broken driver and apparently any remaining users of these old wireless devices not running modern kernels, the driver is being cleared out from the mainline kernel.

Some bits of the PRISM2_USB wireless driver code date back to 1999. It's 2024 and support for these Intersil (Conexant) Prism 2/2.5/3 802.11b USB devices is now removed from the mainline kernel.

The other staging driver removal is the "pi433" driver and is for the Pi433 radio module developed for the Raspberry Pi. This Raspberry Pi radio module was crowdfunded via Kickstarter. Since 2017 there's been no apparent activity on the Pi433 radio module and no driver activity either, so indications are that it's no longer used and unmaintained.

In turn this light staging merge adds just 531 lines of code but in clearing out pi433 and wlan-ng means dropping 19,331 lines from the Linux 6.10 kernel. See the pull request for the full list of staging patches this cycle.