Re: Testing wanted for Linux NFC subsystem

[Stephan Gerhold]

Hi!

On Wed, May 12, 2021 at 10:01:35AM -0700, Mark Greer wrote:
> On Wed, May 12, 2021 at 05:32:35PM +0200, Frieder Schrempf wrote:
> > On 12.05.21 16:43, Krzysztof Kozlowski wrote:
> > > The NFC subsystem is orphaned.  I am happy to spend some cycles to
> > > review the patches, send pull requests and in general keep the NFC
> > > subsystem running.
> > 
> > That's great, thanks!
> > 
> > Maybe you also want to have a look at the userspace side and talk to Mark Greer (on cc). He recently said, that he is supposed to be taking over maintenance for the neard daemon (see this thread: [1]) which currently looks like it's close to being dead (no release for several years, etc.).
> > 
> > I don't know much about the NFC stack and if/how people use it, but without reliable and maintained userspace tooling, the whole thing seems of little use in the long run. Qt has already dropped their neard support for Qt 6 [2], which basically means the mainline NFC stack won't be supported anymore in one of the most common application frameworks for IoT/embedded.
> > 
> > [1] https://lists.01.org/hyperkitty/list/linux-nfc@xxxxxxxxxxxx/thread/OHD5IQHYPFUPUFYWDMNSVCBNO24M45VK/
> > [2] https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-81824
> 
> Re: QT - I've already talked to Alex Blasche from QT (CC'd).  With some
> work we can get Linux NFC/neard back into their good graces.  I/we need
> to find time to put in the work, though.
> 
> An example of the issues they have seen is:
> 
> 	https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-43802
> 
> Another issue I have--and I suspect you, Krzysztof, have as well--is
> lack of hardware.  If anyone reading this wants to volunteer to be a
> tester, please speak up.
> 

Glad to see that Linux NFC might be somewhat less dead now :)

I have a couple of "recycled" smartphones running mainline Linux
and some of them do have NFC chips. I have two with NXP PN547
(supported by nxp,nxp-nci-i2c), one with Samsung S3FWRN5
(samsung,s3fwrn5-i2c) and even one with Broadcom BCM2079x I think
(this one does not have a driver for the Linux NFC subsystem sadly).

+Cc phone-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, in case other people there are
interested in NFC :)

The NXP/Samsung ones seems to work just fine. However, since there are
barely any userspace tools making use of Linux NFC all my testing so far
was limited to polling for devices with "nfctool" and being happy enough
when it realizes that I hold some NFC tag close to the device. :S

I would be happy to do some more testing if someone has something useful
that can be tested. However, I guess ideally we would have someone who
actually uses Linux NFC actively for some real application. :)

The QT integration might be useful for people running postmarketOS [1]
on these smartphones, but so far I haven't really seen any useful NFC
Qt applications either. :/

Thanks!
Stephan

[1]: https://postmarketos.org