Wifi drivers and firmware

Feature Requests
1

It seems only the internal WiFi is supported.

I miss the usual, known drivers , especially I miss support for Atheros.

At least as annotation to install.

Why? The internal WiFi do not support monitoring mode, and obviously packet injection.

Hope this will be considered

2 Likes
2

You should be able to just compile the driver(s) from aircrack-ng on device and modprobe it, this used to work (with usb attached wifi dongle), but maybe now needs some extra kernel_config tweaks, getting those in base config would make sense if itā€™s no longer working (including drivers for devices not included on phone by default is a bit harder sell)

3

I know, but that would require a new compile with every new kernel. Not optimal.

4

Is that an issue really, pretty much all devices stay on the initial kernel afaik? So it should be once and done exercise (on the upstream kernel C2 like projects this could be tedious, but again doubt)

5

Then I would need to distribute that with at least one of my packages.

But sure, leave it up to me.

6

How do you plan to distribute a package for each device? Not OBS afaik, that only covers x.y.z versioning not hw adaptation, maybe add instructions and .sh file so people can run it on whatever device they are? (there are some legacy/outdated ā€˜(for jolla C/xperia X only)ā€™ rpms on openrepos but that also sucks)

7

Its possible, but thatā€™s one reason I ask for ā€œstockā€ kernel support.

8

Kernel configs should be open for PRs.
And i think this is the checker that all of them are same enough:

1 Like
9

But then another person with xyz dongle will ask for inclusion of its driver too and it opens a whole pandoraā€™s box, instead maybe host a website with rpms for each device youā€™re willing to support and everyone there can click a single rpm (called something like [device]-atheros-driverā€¦rpm, [device]-broadcomā€¦ (and a bunch others for all other dongles you plan to support)), these should be once per device unless for upstreamed kernel ones but thatā€™s still hypothethical mostly, if kernel_configs are blocking that, sure a valid concern tho

10

There are more than one reason to support a few USB WiFi dongles. I have one or two.

I donā€™t expect every single chipset to be supported,

To mention a few that would be good choices.

AR9271, RT3070 and MT7612U would satisfy a lot. Then there are the most common, realtek RTL8821CU and RTL8822BU but they are very buggy.

If I should choose, definitely AR9271 is the best choice.

1 Like
11

But thatā€™s just you, you can bring it to a community meeting, but if that floodgate opens there will be more people like you for whom xyz123 is actually crucial and needs to be included and over and over again, shipping drivers for all possible 100k dongles is pretty bad idea, but who knows if you can present a good reasoning during the community meeting maybe jolla willā€¦ Just doubtful, but worth a try?

12

yeah, Well, I compiled for C2 out of tree, itā€™s now included in Sailshark.

Letā€™s see if it works.

2 Likes
13

Tried to build out of tree modules, but that doesnā€™t work, yet.

The GitHub for the kernel source is a mess.