On 05.06.25 00:04, Warner Losh wrote:
On Wed, Jun 4, 2025, 2:57 PM Jan Bramkamp <cr...@rlwinm.de> wrote:
On 04.06.25 19:51, Bjoern A. Zeeb wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Cc: wireless, current, stable, desktop
>
> FreeBSD WiFi development has regained traction. We are facing a
> decision with FreeBSD 15 coming before the end of this year [1].
>
> In order to continue WiFi development, upcoming changes will
inevitably
> break the net80211-driver and net80211-userland interfaces.
> By FreeBSD's standards those would not be mergeable to stable
branches,
> such as stable/15 then.
>
> This would imply development happening in FreeBSD 16-CURRENT
(main at
> that point) would stay there. The first release to ship
anything major
> beyond now would be FreeBSD 16.0 in December 2027 [1].
>
> After some discussion we think this is not a feasible solution
and we
> will declare the KPI and KBI for wireless as unstable in FreeBSD 15.
>
> This allows us to merge changes from main into stable/15 for
inclusion
> in future point releases (e.g., 15.1, 15.2, etc.) as the code
matures.
> However, this also means that during the lifetime of FreeBSD 15,
we may
> introduce breaking changes affecting out-of-tree and in-tree
drivers,
> userland-kernel interfaces, and chipsets. We will address these
> disruptions as they arise.
>
> Before finalizing this decision, we invite feedback from the
community.
> If you have concerns or objections, please speak up now.
>
If the breaking changes are already known it would probably be
best get
stubs into the 15-stable ABI,
but otherwise go ahead declare the ABI unstable.
Please keep in mind that WiFi could be a users only available network
connectivity and treat it the the care it deserves in the release
notes.
Is there a release engineering checklist this could be added to until
the ABI stabilizes again?
If you update userland and kernel at the same time, life will be good.
It's only when you have skew that there's a problem. So install both
for src build, or update all the pkgbase packages at once.
Are there neither WiFi driver kernel modules in ports nor any consumers
of the unstable ABIs (e.g. a WiFi manager other than the base system
wpa_supplicant)?
