The current libsigrok implementation contains at least two device drivers for OLS style hardware, the src/hardware/openbench-logic-sniffer/ and the .../pipistrello-ols/ hierarchies of source files. It is assumed that these share a lot of features yet implement them in redundant ways. Ideally these drivers would become one common driver which supports all the previously supported devices. This avoids leaving one of the implementations falling behind as one of them gets adjusted.
Source code inspection reveals that there are several aspects to this: - Different physical layers underneath a common packet structure. OLS uses genuine serial communication (which p-pls optionally can also provide). For higher throughput p-ols by default uses an FTDI chip in FIFO mode. It's assumed that the communication can get wrapped to serve either of these approaches. - Extensions to the SUMP protocol. p-ols exceeds the SUMP protocol's limits for sample numbers (raises sample memory from 24KiB to 64MiB), and adds edge triggers to the level triggers provided by SUMP. Which results in two protocol variants which have a lot in common. Since the ols driver already needs to grow support for more optional features and board specific activity, it's still assumed that merging p-ols into ols is doable and worthwhile, to increase maintainability.