GeneDot3
commented
2 years ago Nick, thank you for your commitment to providing quality drivers, your work is outstanding. And, thank you for these insights.
Open morrownr opened 2 years ago
GeneDot3
commented
2 years ago Nick, thank you for your commitment to providing quality drivers, your work is outstanding. And, thank you for these insights.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Patches-RTW88-WiFi-USB
My thoughts: I am going to post my thoughts on this subject below but I need to point out that some of my thoughts could be less than fully accurate due to a lack of information about some details. Therefore, what I am posting below is what I think is true:
I watched the patches with the USB support for the in-kernel RTW88 driver flow into the linux-wireless mailing list earlier today. This could eventually mean good in-kernel support for USB WiFi adapters based on the popular rtl8822bu, rtl8812bu, rtl8821cu and rtl881cu chipsets. The words
couldandeventuallywere carefully selected. Here are some things to consider:The patches appear to have been submitted by some kind soul that appears to be a community developer. My hat is off to him. However, if his email address had been
@realtek.comI would have thought that Realtek is actually on board but that does not appear to be the case. The main problem I see with this being a community effort is that Realtek is terrible at providing help in the form of documentation and communication. I know this because I try to maintain 5 Realtek drivers here at this site. There are times when you need to know what is going on in firmware and times when you need to ask a question and I don't see that happening here.The above is very different than Mediatek's support for USB WiFi adapters. When you see patches for Mediatek chipsets, you mostly see those patches coming from folks with email addresses that end in
mediatek.com(Mediatek employees) or from long time kernel devs that are likely under contract with Mediatek and/or the foundation to get the job done. Mediatek is far more committed to supporting its products than is Realtek.Just because a series of patches was submitted does not mean they will go into the kernel in a timely manner... or at all.
Realtek has two teams that support WiFi. One team supports USB WiFi and the
otherteam supports the rest. Theotherteam actually does a pretty good job at far as I can tell. The USB team is bad. Two points to make here: 1. When you see patches going in from someone with an email that ends in@realtek.comit is almost certainly from theotherteam and not from the USB team and 2. We likely will not see help from the Realtek USB team unless Mediatek is able to take enough market share from Realtek that it gets managements attention.I consider Realtek (and this new community help) to be around 5 years behind Mediatek. Mediatek already has its USB WiFi 6 driver (mt7621u) in the kernel (can't buy adapters yet but they are coming). As far as I know, there is no effort to support USB on the rtw89 (WiFi 6) driver and the USB WiFi 6 driver that Realtek did release is TERRIBLE. Linux users wishing to move to USB WiFi 6 adapters SHOULD WAIT on the mt7921 based adapters to become available.
I noticed that Nvidia finally gave in this week and announced they are going open source with their video drivers. Why did this happen? Likely because they are losing market share to AMD. I have only bought equipment with AMD and Intel video chipsets for many years. The reason for this is that I understand that a proprietary driver will meet the need today but be problematic in the long run. I like to control how long I keep my hardware in operation, not some company that has no incentive to do so. My opinion is that the only way to get Realtek to support its USB WiFi hardware the right way is for us in the Linux community to buy Mediatek based adapters. Once it starts to show in the financial statements, it should cause Realtek management to start asking questions.
Overall, I consider the subject patches to be a good thing and my hat is off to the dev who submitted the patches. However, we need to be aware that this is not a battle that has been won. Far from it.
Regards
@morrownr