Questions about Network Adaptor Support

[SamK]

TC is becoming well known as natively supporting a wide range of network adaptors. This type of out-of-the-box functionality is one of the strengths of TC as it is very user friendly.

How is it decided which adaptors/chipsets are supported?  Is it by request or some other mechanism?

I have a USB adaptor based on rtl8192  which is working well using ndiswrapper and the WinXP driver. Is this in line for native support?
   

[curaga]

Everything stable in the kernel is supported.

[SamK]

Everything stable in the kernel is supported.

Please will you clarify this a little as I am unclear what you mean?

Is the rtl8192 currently regarded as unstable?  Is there a central reference available of stable rtl devices?
 

[curaga]

http://kernel.xc.net/index.cgi?version=2.6.33&arch=x86

Everything under the staging menu is considered unstable. The three 8192 (su,e,u) drivers are there, I'm afraid.

edit: This seems to be still the case in 2.6.35.

[SamK]

http://kernel.xc.net/index.cgi?version=2.6.33&arch=x86

Everything under the staging menu is considered unstable. The three 8192 (su,e,u) drivers are there, I'm afraid.

edit: This seems to be still the case in 2.6.35.

Thanks for that - this is a completely new area for me - no experience of it at all.

I realize that you cannot supply a definitive answer to this, however, it it usual that the drivers from this list (in this case 3 x 8192) in due course become stable?  If so, when the TC kernel is updated is an announcement made of the added drivers?
 

[curaga]

When they are stable enough, they will be moved out of the staging area.

TC kernel updates are usually only once per major version.

[tinypoodle]

This would rather be for the request thread, but an idea would be that someone could build all staging wireless drivers, for a wireless-staging-*.tcz.
From what it appears, wireless drivers from the staging tree are relatively widely used by end users.

[curaga]

They also tend to drop connections, oops, crash, and otherwise be much worse than even ndiswrapper

[tinypoodle]

Yes, it is a choice of the lesser of evils, but I would always prefer to at least give a native driver under development a try, before having to resort to ndiswrapper.

OTOH i have experienced dropping of connections even with a driver which is in stable kernel branch, but not since very long (rt2500usb)

[SamK]

Is there a command in TC3 that will list the kernel supported drivers/chipsets?  If so it will be useful as a reference when considering a purchase.
 

[curaga]

Drivers (wired): ls /lib/modules/*/kernel/drivers/net -R
Drivers (wireless): the .list file of the wireless-2.6xx extension

Pci ids recognized by each driver can be seen in /lib/modules/*/modules.usbmap and modules.pcimap.
For wireless ids to appear there the extension has to be loaded.

[SamK]

Thanks.

[SamK]

Reporting success.

After a few days break, I decided to return to attempting to compile the driver for this device and have finally achieved it.  What follows is partly a memory jogger for me and partly an assist for other TC users.

From the Realtek web site I downloaded the most recent sources I could find:
RTL8192SU_usb_linux_v2.6.0006.20100625.zip.
From the zip file it seems this provides a driver that is suitable for:
rtl8712, rtl8188, rtl8191, and rtl8192SU devices.

Following a suggestion on #tinycorelinux (thanks jls_legalize) the driver compiled and produced 8712u.ko, which I then compressed to 8712u.ko.gz and turned into an extension:
rtl8712u-2.6.33.3-tinycore.tcz
This places the module in the same path as those in wireless-2.6.33.3-tinycore.tcz and is listed in OnBoot.

The result seems to work well.  No dropped connections no crashes.  Connection to a router using a 40Mhz frequency, N standard data rate, WPA2 security and 100% signal strength, all give dependable consistent results.
 

[JackBug]

SamK,
 
 EXACTLY what steps did you take to compile the driver?

When I try to "make", I get the error  /lib/modules/2.6.33.3-tinycore/build - no such file or directory

I cannot find any build file or directory under /lib/modules/2.6.33.3-tinycore or any where on the system

ANY help appreciated.

Regards.

[Juanito]

When I try to "make", I get the error  /lib/modules/2.6.33.3-tinycore/build - no such file or directory

I'd guess this would be taken care of by loading the linux-headers-2.6.33.3-tinycore extension.

If not, you'll need to unpack the kernel source somewhere and make a symlink /lib/modules/2.6.33.3-tinycore/build that points to it.