Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org designates 209.132.180.67 as permitted sender) client-ip=209.132.180.67;
Subject: Re: Support for RTL8188FU
To:     Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>,
        linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
References: <20191001160305.qrl4nt2jmdsogaaz@linutronix.de>
From:   Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@lwfinger.net>
Message-ID: <3af284c7-ee46-dd42-9549-de55feae2528@lwfinger.net>
Date:   Tue, 1 Oct 2019 11:47:44 -0500
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/68.1.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <20191001160305.qrl4nt2jmdsogaaz@linutronix.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org
Precedence: bulk

On 10/1/19 11:03 AM, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm looking into support for RTL8188FU with the vendor driver next to
> me. There is a driver called rtl8188eu in staging. Is there a way to
> figure out the difference between E and F?
> Then there is rtl8xxxu outside of staging claiming to support
> RTL8188[CR]U. No idea what C & R is and how much difference there is
> towards F or E.
> 
> Any suggestions what would be the best way towards support for the F
> chip?

A quick Internet search shows me that the RTL8188FU is a low-cost chip used on 
Raspberry PI and other similar low-cost systems.

The USB group at Realtek is notorious for their lack of support for Linux 
drivers. The ones they release have lots of dead code used for Windows and 
FreeBSD drivers, and they have lots of code that applies to other chips. With 
other drivers that I have placed at GitHub, some of the commits that remove dead 
code will remove as many of 10K lines.

You should be able to find the code that differs between 8188EU and 8188FU to 
see what is different.

The 8188RU is a special variant of the 8188EU. I have no idea what an 8188CU is.

Your only starting point is the driver that is next to you!

Larry