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Reduce out of the tree wireless drivers

Description

We are keeping large collection of 3rd party wireless drivers that are getting compiled with the kernel. As those drivers are slowly emerging to the mainline kernel it is nice if we would keep an eye on which we can remove. This lower maintainability burden as all those drivers needs to be regularly adjusted due to API changes in the Linux kernel.

It is suggested that we proceed one by one, testing for basic features. In case driver comes with advanced features such as monitoring, which won't be present in mainline, we keep that driver and disable the one in the kernel sources, starting with 6.1.y

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Patrick YavitzNovember 12, 2023 at 11:55 PM

Absolutely CONFIG_RTW88_8723DU is available. How well it works I have no clue, as I don’t own one of those dongles. I can say I review a lot and I’ve yet to see anyone report anything concerning.

│ │ <M> Realtek 8822BE PCI wireless network adapter │ │
│ │ <M> Realtek 8822BS SDIO wireless network adapter │ │
│ │ <M> Realtek 8822BU USB wireless network adapter │ │
│ │ <M> Realtek 8822CE PCI wireless network adapter │ │
│ │ <M> Realtek 8822CS SDIO wireless network adapter │ │
│ │ <M> Realtek 8822CU USB wireless network adapter │ │
│ │ <M> Realtek 8723DE PCI wireless network adapter │ │
│ │ <M> Realtek 8723DS SDIO wireless network adapter │ │
│ │ <M> Realtek 8723DU USB wireless network adapter │ │
│ │ <M> Realtek 8821CE PCI wireless network adapter │ │
│ │ <M> Realtek 8821CS SDIO wireless network adapter │ │
│ │ <M> Realtek 8821CU USB wireless network adapter

 

If it was me, I would remove all third party drivers that have a RTW88 equivalent. Unless it was a special use case or required for a board related to Armbian Partners.

Igor PecovnikNovember 12, 2023 at 10:52 PM
Edited

What is the status here?
Do you perhaps know if we can switch from CONFIG_RTL8723DU to CONFIG_RTW88_8723DU ? And remove (1) one external driver.

Patrick YavitzMay 23, 2023 at 2:31 AM
Edited

This is the gist of it. Linux 6.4 is introducing a lot of REALTEK wireless goodies which are currently out of the tree wireless drivers in armbian/build. In order for Armbian to introduce proper wireless support for the BPI-CM4IO, we need to backport the current RTW88 patch set into armbian/build. Specifically for 6.1 and 6.3. If we do proper, we can also drag in BS, BU, CU and others.

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Created May 22, 2023 at 7:39 PM
Updated November 25, 2024 at 1:21 PM