Linux 6.13 To Drop Some Old & No Longer Maintained Staging Drivers

With a number of patches queued this week into the staging tree ahead of the Linux 6.13 kernel, a number of old and no longer maintained hardware drivers are set to be removed in the next kernel cycle.

This week a number of staging drivers were removed where the code is either unused or the drivers old and not actively maintained by open-source developers.

The GDM724x is removed for supporting the GCT GDM724x LTE chip based USB modem devices. This driver was merged back in 2013 but is being removed now as the driver isn't being maintained and yields a maintenance workload, the manufacturer GCT doesn't respond to any emails/support, there doesn't appear to be any of the said chips easily available for purchase, there is not any hardware documentation available, and no apparent usage of this driver remaining in the Linux community. Removing the driver clears out 3.6k lines of code and lowers the maintenance burden for other kernel developers.

Also being axed is the the VT6655 driver for VIA VT6655 WiFi chipset is being removed. VIA worked on this driver and upstreamed it back in 2009 and developers decided its time to remove. The VT6655 only supports 802.11 b/g, the peak throughput of the hardware is only around 3MB/s and typically about 1.7MB/s, the overall performance is very poor, is only available in mini PCI (not mini PCIe), and is rare to find any VT6655 hardware still available for purchase.

Another driver to be removed is the VTS5208 that is some 23.6k lines of code. This code provided Realtek PCIe card reader support with the RTS5208 and RTS5288. This driver was contributed back in 2011 but doesn't appear to be actively used nor do any card readers using this chipset appear to be available still in retail channels.

Lastly, the RTL8192e driver is being removed. There is 24.1k lines of code now being cleared up for this Realtek RTL8192E wireless NIC driver. An Intel engineer is removing that Realtek driver in order to allow for other Linux networking cleanups:

"This driver is using lib80211 and any driver that plans to ever leave staging should never have done that, so remove the driver to enable cleaning up lib80211 into libipw inside the old Intel drivers."

That's what has happened so far this week within the staging-next Git branch of planned driver removals for Linux 6.13. We'll see if any other hardware drivers get queued up for removal in the coming weeks ahead of the Linux 6.13 merge window happening in mid to late November.