RTL8723BS Driver Continues Dominating The Staging Area Activity For Linux 7.3

Upstreamed back in 2017 for Linux 4.12 was the RTL8723BS driver in the kernel's staging area. Nine years later it remains in staging and remains a frequent target for clean-ups and code improvements as it tries to work its way out.

The staging driver updates were merged for Linux 7.3 this week and there is "nothing major in here at all" remarked Greg Kroah-Hartman. Of the staging churn, the RTL8723BS WiFi driver once again dominated. The RTL8723BS is an 802.11 b/g/n SDIO-based WiFi and Bluetooth driver that has been use by various budget single board computers to early Intel Compute Stick devices. This driver has been a mess and described as "a beast of a driver" given all its abstractions and other code spaghetti. Nearly a decade later it remains in staging and sees code improvements as well as the likes of hardening against malicious WiFi APs.

For the Linux 7.3 staging changes this Realtek driver easily dominates with a majority of the changes from coding style and refactoring to addressing other issues with the driver. Many of these changes continue to be from Linux kernel newcomers to gain more experience in kernel driver development.

Many of these changes at this point are rather mundane like renaming camel case values and dropping unused pieces of code, but nearly a decade later it's still being cleaned up.

With no new staging drivers or the likes, the ongoing RTL8723BS clean-up remains the main focus (and bulk of the staging activity) of the Linux 7.3 staging pull.