On Mon, Jul 06, 2015 at 06:25:25PM +0200, P. Varet wrote: > Hi all, > > This is me keeping a promise I made to Greg KH half a year ago. (Thread > here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2ny1lz/im_greg_kroahhartman_linux_kernel_developer_ama/cmhyvqh) > > > WHAT IS THIS? > ============= > > This is an alternate implementation of a driver for the RTL8192CU family of > chipsets. It's exactly the driver made available by Realtek on their > website, except patched so it will compile against kernels that no longer > provide the old procfs API and with calls to strnicmp() replaced with > strncasecmp(). > > A bunch of tiny details also got fixed, but nothing important. (Making logs > less verbose and such.) > > This alternate driver is maintained here: https://github.com/pvaret/rtl8192cu-fixes > > The original Realtek driver is available here: http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=48&PFid=48&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false&Downloads=true#2772 > > > WHY NOT USE THE EXISTING DRIVER? > ================================ > > The RTL8192CU driver that currently ships with the kernel doesn't work well, > or sometimes at all, with many of the devices that it purports to support. > As far as I can tell, this is due to this still unsolved bug: > https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57171 > > The driver provided in this patch works with many such devices (though, > sadly, not all). It allows owners of devices such as the Belkin N300 USB > WiFi adapter to use them on Linux. > > My knowledge of the inner workings of that class of hardware is WAY too low > to tell why it doesn't work with some devices even though those use the > 8192cu chipset. (I blame Realtek.) > > > IS THIS PATCH COMPLETE? > ======================= > > Alas, no. > > The Makefile that comes with this driver is intended to compile it as a DKMS > module. It would have to be ported to a 'proper' kernel Makefile. > > It also lacks a proper port of the procfs populating code to the new procfs > API, though that doesn't prevent it from working. (I only disabled the code > that uses the old API on kernel versions > 3.9.) > > > WHY MERGE IT? > ============= > > As far as I know, it's the only way to get certain devices, like the > aforementioned Belkin N300, to work at all on Linux. > > I therefore get a LOT of requests to try and see this driver mainlined. I > also promised Greg KH I'd submit it here. (And sorry about the latency, by > the way. These have been busy months.) > > That said, it's obviously not ready to be mainlined yet, of course. There's > the Makefile issue, and from what I can tell, the code could use a good > scrubbing. (Stuff that's sadly out of my immediate skillset.) > > > PATCH > ===== > > Attached as a bzipped file because it's LARGE. I hope that's okay. How about making it a patch for drivers/staging/ ? That way the code can get cleaned up in-tree by others? thanks, greg k-h _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://driverdev.linuxdriverproject.org/mailman/listinfo/driverdev-devel
