Realtek rtl8723bs Driver Graduates Out Of Staging Area In Linux 7.4

After nearly a decade in the Linux kernel's staging area and being worked on by many different kernel developer newcomers, the Realtek rtl8723bs graduated out of the staging area and is now a full-fledged member of the Linux networking subsystem. In 2017 all the way back in Linux 4.12 this Realtek SDIO WiFi driver was added to the kernel's staging area. Over the years and succeeding kernel releases there has been a lot of code clean-ups to the driver to make it better align with the upstream kernel standards. The originally messy code was considered "a beast of a driver" and besides the typical kernel cleaning needed to address situations like malicious WiFi APs and for many kernel cycles was the most active staging driver for changes with so many opportunities for new kernel developers to "get their feet wet" working on a kernel driver with easy changes. Now with Linux 7.4 there is a last round of rtl8723bs driver fixes and via the networking pull request is then moved over to the kernel's networking subsystem proper. Greg Kroah-Hartman commented in the staging pull request for Linux 7.4: "The huge majority of changes in here were to the rtl8723bs driver, which ended up being deleted entirely through the wifi driver tree, so while the work here was nice to have done to get experience by people, the overall goal was achieved in that we have a solid working and sane driver in the real part of the tree now." So after a decade of activity, the Realtek rtl8723bs 802.11 b/g/n SDIO WiFi/WLAN and Bluetooth chipset finally is a fully-developed kernel driver leaving the staging area.