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

On 05.06.25 00:04, Warner Losh wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 4, 2025, 2:57 PM Jan Bramkamp <crest@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)?