Way back in 2017 for the Linux 4.12 kernel the Realtek rtl8723bs WiFi driver was added to the kernel's staging area. Nearly a decade later, it's still being cleaned-up to suit the more rigorous non-staging area of the kernel in the formal networking subsystem. For Linux 7.2, the staging pull request is once again dominated by clean-ups to this Realtek WiFi driver.

The Realtek RTL8723BS staging driver being cleaned-up has been a common theme for many recent Linux kernels and yet again saw many clean-ups for Linux 7.2. Greg Kroah-Hartman described the RTL8723BS clean-up work this cycle as:

"rtl8723bs driver reworking and cleanups, being the bulk of this merge window given all of the issues and wrappers involved in that beast of a driver."

Indeed, this "beast of a driver" saw 154 patches just this cycle alone working to clean-up the WiFi driver and represents a majority of the staging changes for Linux 7.2.

Most of the patches are for removing various function wrappers, cleaning up various elements of code, renaming some functions, and other typical code cleaning to remove unnecessary abstractions and making this driver more inline with other upstream Linux WiFi drivers.

The Realtek RTL8723BS is an 802.11 b/g/n WiFi chipset with Bluetooth 4.0 support too. Hopefully this Realtek driver will manage to graduate from the Linux kernel staging area while 802.11n at least still has some relevance.

The full list of Linux 7.2 staging changes can be found via this pull that is already merged to mainline.