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morrownr / USB-WiFi

USB WiFi Adapter Information for Linux
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[News] New drivers for rtl8812au, rtl8821au and rtl8811au based adapters sent to linux-wireless #484

Open morrownr opened 2 months ago

morrownr commented 2 months ago

If you have an adapter based on the rtl8812au, rtl8821au or rtl8811au chips, you will soon have support in the kernel if all goes well.

Today, 2024-08-11, 20 patches were submitted by Bitterblue Smith:

https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-wireless/list/

The first patch has a title of:

[01/20] wifi: rtw88: Add some definitions for RTL8821AU/RTL8812AU

It will likely take 3-4 weeks of quality control work by kernel devs but hopefully the new drivers will be ready to go into kernel 6.12 when development on that kernel starts in the next 5-6 weeks.

These chips have been popular with Linux users for many years and I think users will be pleased with the new drivers. My own testing shows very good results. Is it possible bugs will be in the new code? Yes. That will need to be handled as bugs come up.

Special thanks go to Bitterblue Smith for the long hours of coding, to Larry Finger (RIP) for the help and the use of his rtw88 repo for testing and for the many testers that have made this happen.

Once these drivers are in a kernel that is available for stable release, likely kernel 6.12, if the quality of the drivers is at the quality we want, I will open 2 new categories in the Plug and Play List: rtl8812au and rtl8811au. There are still new adapters with these chips available to purchase new and, in my opinion, they are the most stable of the Realtek WiFi 5 class chips.

If you have questions, please ask.

@morrownr

morrownr commented 2 months ago

Also, numerous additional patches are going into rtw88 that will improve performance for all drivers supported in mainline rtw88:

Supported Chipsets

There is also a plan to add support for the rtl8814au chip. Hopefully that comes to pass.

This should greatly improve the availability of WiFi 5 usb wifi adapters with quality drivers available to Linux users.

Warning: My warning to avoid purchases of Realtek WiFi 6 usb wifi adapters still stands. Good support for Realtek WiFi 6 usb adapters could be years away and all of the Realtek WiFi 6 usb wifi adapters that I am aware of are multi-state (windows driver on board) so it is simply best to avoid the Realtek WiFi 6 adapters. If you want a WiFi 6 class or WiFi 7 class adapter, my recommendation is to get single-state adapters and cards with Mediatek chips. Several WiFi 6 Mediatek chip based adapters are shown in the Plug and Play List. Hopefully we will have Mediatek WiFi 7 mt7925 chip based adapters soon... the driver is in mainline already and has been since kernel 6.7. I already use a M.2 mt7925 (WiFi 7) based card with Ubuntu 24.04.