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.
I don't have any SDIO devices accessible to me, so it's not easy for me to do something about it. It shouldn't be undoable to add SDIO support to it, but keep in mind the Realtek devices run in multiple generations and I currently only support the 8188cu/8192cu/8723au generation. I am working on 8723bu/8192eu at the moment, but they are showing up to be a little more different than the older generation than I thought at first, so it will take a bit longer than I hoped.
Larry Finger mentioned he was interested in looking into this, but I don't know how far he got.
I know very little about SDIO, any idea if it's possible to get SDIO to PCIe adapters?
If you can get devices in SD card form factor you could plug them into some laptop SD cards slots, alternatively I could probably organise to get you a couple of the common ARM devices to test against.
Peter
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Peter Robinson