out-of-tree mac80211 driver in a package feed; how to determine mac80211 version

[Christian Marangi (Ansuel)]

Il giorno mer 29 gen 2025 alle ore 01:39 Tim Harvey
<tharvey at gateworks.com> ha scritto:
>
> Greetings,
>
> I've got an out-of-tree mac80211 driver [1] that I built in a package
> feed. The driver has a lot of kernel compatibility defines using
> KERNEL_VERSION(x,y,z) and LINUX_VERSION_CODE to support various
> kernels from fairly old up to 6.12. I'm finding that this doesn't
> quite work for an OpenWrt package as its the mac80211 version that
> needs to be used for LINUX_VERSION_CODE instead of the kernel being
> used.
>
> Is there a recommendation of how to handle this?
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Tim
> [1] https://github.com/Gateworks/gw-openwrt-packages/blob/master/gateworks/nrc7292/Makefile
>

Hi Tim,

for mac80211, we use the backports project and that follows a
different version than
what is used for linux.
If your intention is to propose this in OpenWrt, ideally all the
define flag should
be dropped and produce a more up-to-date driver with maybe 6.12 and 6.6 max.

But it really doesn't make sense to have IFDEF to support 2.x or 3.x...

Also consider that mac80211 backports define have different config flag to
differentiate from kernel config (CPTCFG prefix)