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morrownr / USB-WiFi

USB WiFi Adapter Information for Linux
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News: USB WiFi Adapter Bug Information #493

Open morrownr opened 2 months ago

morrownr commented 2 months ago

Greetings,

Over the last several months, we have experienced an increase in the bugs we are seeing with many of our USB WiFi adapters on Linux. This is happening for several reasons that I will try to explain to the best of my ability. If you are experiencing a bug, please post it here and at other appropriate locations and if you have a solution or work-around, please post that as well.

USB WiFi adapters, particularly the newer models, have been taking a hit on Linux over the last several months because they depend on 3 subsystems or stacks if you will. They depend on the following stacks: wireless, usb and bluetooth.

The wireless stack has been undergoing a lot of work to support WiFi 6 and 7. This work can break drivers, even if the drivers are older WiFi 4 or 5 drivers. It is taking time to sort out many of these issues. The USB stack is also causing some problems. USB3 is more problematic than USB2. USB3 is not mankind's greatest invention. We are even seeing problems that appear to be related to bluetooth with some mt7921au based adapters on some systems. If you see this problem, you should be able to get wifi going again by deleting the mt7921au bluetooth firmware file.

One of the fundamental problems is when a change to a stack breaks a driver and the author of the driver does not feel like it is his/her responsibility to fix the driver because the driver was working fine before the patch that broke it. So, as you can see, this is all more complicated than you may realize. It is going to take time for things to stabilize.

What can you do if you have a bug? Right now, one thing to consider, if your distro supports doing so, is to move back to kernel 6.6 (LTS) or even to kernel 6.1 (LTS) and see if things improve. Over time things should improve. Now is not a good time for USB WiFi adapter users to be on the bleeding edge if you need your adapter to get work done.

Regards,

@morrownr

briantbutton commented 3 weeks ago

Thank you for that. It is really good to be kept apprised.