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

[Petros Aggelatos]

Hi Mark,

Thanks a lot for the pointer. I'll try the patches and see if they
work. It's not so trivial as I'm using the Edimax on a Raspberry Pi
but I don't see why they wouldn't work.

Regards,
Petros

On 26 February 2015 at 00:30, Mark Cave-Ayland
<mark.cave-ayland at ilande.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.
>