Is wifi firmware extension needed in my case?

[Richa Rd]

I have a cheap wifi usb dongle bought off ebay for around $8.00 labelled "WIFI n 300M wireless USB adaptor".
I am using TC Plus 11.1 X86 default installation, and the wifi works ok without loading firmware-rtlwifi.tcz, and also with loading the firmware. I see in dmesg for both cases the following error:-
 
usb 6-2: Direct firmware load for rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw.bin failed with error -2
usb 6-2: Falling back to sysfs fallback for: rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw.bin

Attachment dmesg1.txt is the tail of dmesg without firmware, dmesg2.txt is with firmware loaded and installed.
I guess the question is do I need the firmware or not?

[Juanito]

usb 6-2: Direct firmware load for rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw.bin failed with error -2
usb 6-2: Falling back to sysfs fallback for: rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw.bin

You get this message because the kernel first tries to load firmware from the driver itself - when this fails, it will try to load firmware from /usr/local/lib/firmware.

Perhaps in your case firmware is only required for added functionality.

[Richa Rd]

Thanks Juanito,
As long as I continue to have no problems with wifi, I will leave the firmware extension out.