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Subject: Re: Support for RTL8188FU
To:     Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>
Cc:     linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
References: <20191001160305.qrl4nt2jmdsogaaz@linutronix.de>
 <3af284c7-ee46-dd42-9549-de55feae2528@lwfinger.net>
 <20191001174612.4kj3mt3h5epidyyk@linutronix.de>
From:   Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@lwfinger.net>
Message-ID: <b958b669-a683-d7cd-6bbf-bfe3e674f62d@lwfinger.net>
Date:   Tue, 1 Oct 2019 13:52:30 -0500
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On 10/1/19 12:46 PM, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
> On 2019-10-01 11:47:44 [-0500], Larry Finger wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> yeah, seen that.
> 
>> You should be able to find the code that differs between 8188EU and 8188FU
>> to see what is different.
> 
> So you would recommend to try to merge it to the staging driver.

If that is what you read, that is not what I meant.

The staging driver is really old and does not support nl80211 and friends. If 
you are willing to undertake a 6 to 12-month rewrite of the driver you have, and 
it supports RTL8188EU, then a replacement of the staging driver would be what 
you should do. If you do not want to make that kind of time commitment, then a 
GitHub repo would be your best bet; however, GitHub already has 5 such repos for 
the rtl8188fu. As far as I can tell, none of them are yours.

The first thing I would do is clone the v5.2.2.4 branch of lwfinger/rtl8188eu at 
GitHub, add the USB ID for your device, and see if that works. I expect it will. 
If so, that would get you quite a ways toward the changes needed to get that 
driver into staging.

Larry