Realtek wifi on ARM devices

[Peter Robinson]

Hi All,

I know from various questions in the past that a number of ARM devices
come with realtek wifi interfaces. A new driver the a lot of the
realtek usb wifi devices has landed in the 4.4 kernel. All the gory
details are in the commit log [1] it's not a fully featured driver
just yet but should work well for the standard connect to your AP use
case.

It would be great if those of you with such devices could test a
rawhide kernel and report back good and/or bad experiences.

Cheers,
Peter

[1] http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=26...

[Zamir Sun]

Here are my test result:

System: Fedora 23 ARM XFCE image (configured as multi-user.target)
Hardware: BeagleBone Black Rev.C

---Device 1: EDUP EP-N8508GS---
lsusb:
Bus 002 Device 006: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8188CUS 
802.11n WLAN Adapter

Fails to connect to WPA2-PSK protected WiFi.
Connected to open wifi but not able to ping to default gateway

https://paste.fedoraproject.org/287939/14469065/

---Device 2: Netcore (I do not have its branded product name)---
lsusb:
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 0bda:8178 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8192CU 
802.11n WLAN Adapter

Fails to connect to WPA2-PSK protectes WiFi.
Connected to open wifi and able to download for about 1 minute, then the 
network becomes not usable.

https://paste.fedoraproject.org/287943/44690690/

HTH.

Zamir SUN

On 11/07/2015 08:01 PM, Peter Robinson wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I know from various questions in the past that a number of ARM devices
> come with realtek wifi interfaces. A new driver the a lot of the
> realtek usb wifi devices has landed in the 4.4 kernel. All the gory
> details are in the commit log [1] it's not a fully featured driver
> just yet but should work well for the standard connect to your AP use
> case.
>
> It would be great if those of you with such devices could test a
> rawhide kernel and report back good and/or bad experiences.
>
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> [1] http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=26...
> _______________________________________________
> arm mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm

[Clive Messer]

On Sat, 2015-11-07 at 12:01 +0000, Peter Robinson wrote:
> It would be great if those of you with such devices could test a
> rawhide kernel and report back good and/or bad experiences.

Peter,

I use a bunch of 8188CUS/8192CU dongles and have tried rtl8xxxu. The
biggest issue, (well, not really an issue, reliability is more
important to me), is the lack of throughput. I typically see ~500KB/s,
rather than MBs. Having said that, it's definitely already more stable
than the upstream rtl8192cu driver. (Which is definitely afflicted with
crap throughput, as well as stalls and disconnects from AP.) The
Realtek vendor, (8192cu driver that the Pi people patch into their
kernel by default), is still my driver of choice for the
8188CUS/8192CU, by virtue of the fact it is stable and decent
throughput.

Anyway, a round of applause for Jes! And hopefully as he starts to work
on features, like 40MHz channels, rtl8xxxu throughput will improve.

Clive
-- 
Clive Messer

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 07-11-15 13:01, Peter Robinson wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I know from various questions in the past that a number of ARM devices
> come with realtek wifi interfaces. A new driver the a lot of the
> realtek usb wifi devices has landed in the 4.4 kernel. All the gory
> details are in the commit log [1] it's not a fully featured driver
> just yet but should work well for the standard connect to your AP use
> case.
>
> It would be great if those of you with such devices could test a
> rawhide kernel and report back good and/or bad experiences.

Cool stuff, a lot of Allwinner devices come with these wifi chips
atm I do not really have time to run any sort of worth-while
tests. But I'll enable this driver in my own local build test kernels
and I will try to use it whenever I use wifi.

Jens, are there any plans to also add support for sdio based variants of
these chips ?  Quite a few devices also come with sdio based variants,
such as the C.H.I.P.

Regards,

Hans

[Peter Robinson]

> > I know from various questions in the past that a number of ARM devices
> > come with realtek wifi interfaces. A new driver the a lot of the
> > realtek usb wifi devices has landed in the 4.4 kernel. All the gory
> > details are in the commit log [1] it's not a fully featured driver
> > just yet but should work well for the standard connect to your AP use
> > case.
> >
> > It would be great if those of you with such devices could test a
> > rawhide kernel and report back good and/or bad experiences.
>
> Cool stuff, a lot of Allwinner devices come with these wifi chips
> atm I do not really have time to run any sort of worth-while
> tests. But I'll enable this driver in my own local build test kernels
> and I will try to use it whenever I use wifi.
>
> Jens, are there any plans to also add support for sdio based variants of
> these chips ?  Quite a few devices also come with sdio based variants,
> such as the C.H.I.P.

Yes, I'm been meaning to ask the same question, it seems they're also
used on a bunch of windows tablets too.

Peter