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

[Petros Aggelatos]

Hi Mark,

You were right about the latest drivers. The reason they wouldn't work
for me is because the Raspberry Pi foundation disabled the rtlwifi
driver from their tree in 2012 [1] and it has been like that since.
After I patched the sources to actually compile rtlwifi it worked
fine, I didn't even had to add the RFC patches you pointed me at.

[1] https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/commit/a9dd0a015a3a3f9809d58735247caeee5614a068

Thanks a lot for your help,
Petros

On 26 February 2015 at 11:27, Petros Aggelatos <petrosagg at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>