The staging area of the Linux kernel, where preliminary code initially appears to mature until being promoted out, continues seeing a lot of code churn. With Linux 6.17 the staging updates were submitted and now merged with one driver in particular standing out.
The staging changes this cycle weren’t too particularly noteworthy on a grand scale. While back during the Linux 6.16 merge window it was talked about that the GPIB bus code might be ready to move out of staging in the next kernel cycle (Linux 6.17), that didn’t happen. Greg Kroah-Hartman instead punted it off as something likely to happen for the next kernel merge window: “gpib cleanups and tweaks with the majority of the big issues now taken care of. Odds are it will move out of staging/ in the next merge window if all goes well.“
Meanwhile with the Axis-FIFO staging driver for the Xilinx Zynq SoC’s AXI-Stream FIFO IP, the sysfs code was stripped away as it turned out to be broken and then restructured to using DebugFS in working form:
“axis-fifo sysfs api removed and debugfs api added. The sysfs api didn’t work at all so obviously no one was using it. Add the same information into debugfs as that’s the proper place for it, and make it actually work.”
Seeing the most staging code churn this cycle is the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi/Bluetooth driver. Greg Kroah-Hartman remarked around the Realtek RTL8723BS driver activity:
“more constant cleanups and layer removals from the rtl8723bs driver. It’s amazing how many layers deep they really are, all cleanups here are great to see”
More details on all of these staging code changes for Linux 6.17 via this pull request.
