Re: HEADS UP: wireless KPI and KBI and FreeBSD 15

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?