Driver support for RTL8188{C,CU,CUS} wifi chips

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

On 25/02/15 20:13, Petros Aggelatos wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have an Edimax wifi adapter which uses the RTL8188CU chipset but it
> doesn't work in AP mode with the current hostapd/wpa_supplicant.
> 
> This is the error I'm getting:
> 
> nl80211: Driver does not support authentication/association or connect
> commands
> nl80211: Remove monitor interface: refcount=0
> netlink: Operstate: ifindex=4 linkmode=0 (kernel-control), operstate=6
> (IF_OPER_UP)
> nl80211: Set mode ifindex 4 iftype 2 (STATION)
> nl80211: Failed to set interface 4 to mode 2: -19 (No such device)
> nl80211 driver initialization failed.
> 
> After looking around it turns out Realtek had once released a modified
> hostapd (back in version 0.8.0) that indeed makes the chipset work. I
> also found a Github repo of just the patches modified to work with
> modern versions of hostapd [1].
> 
> My question is if accepting these patches upstream is something that you
> want. I'm currently trying to make them work with the latest git tree
> because I need it for a project I work on and it would be really nice if
> this chipset was supported out of the box.

The official Realtek driver has been dead and unsupported for a very
long time, however fortunately the next generation Realtek drivers in
3.20 (or 4.0) should work fine with standard hostapd in AP mode:

http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-wireless/msg133477.html

Does upgrading to a recent kernel solve the problem for you?


ATB,

Mark.