On 5/23/22 15:01, Suse User wrote:
On Sun, 22 May 2022 20:09:54 +0200 Stefan Seyfried wrote:
If you want this to happen, it would probably be useful to state what works with the "newer" driver that does not work with the in-kernel driver. Just the updated version number does not provide anything useful.
It is not "newer" (with quotes, implying that it is not), it is newer (without quotes). I have not compared the code line by line and I am not a full time programmer but perhaps for some years something may have been improved. Looking at the commits can provide the useful info you talk about. What I do know for sure is that trying to build an older driver version (downloaded source code from TP-Link's website) did not work for me (result: errors). What did work was the version I shared here.
On Sun, 22 May 2022 13:15:55 -0500 Larry Finger wrote:
It is too bad that running 'make && sudo make install' when the kernel changes is so laborious.
It depends what computer you are running it on. Consider an old 32-bit laptop (which otherwise does excellent work for what it is used for) with limited resources and on a fairly slow Internet connection. Each system update requiring driver update takes additional traffic (for the additional dev packages), disk space and time to build - sensibly more than simply running 'zypper up'.
Using an out-of-kernel driver always involves extra work and packages. That is the choice you make.
On Sun, 22 May 2022 13:15:55 -0500 Larry Finger wrote:
Although I am retired, and can devote nearly full-time effort to Linux, I am busy with other things, thus I am not planning on updating the rtl8188eu code in staging. In fact, there are a number of people currently converting that code so that it can be moved to the regular wireless trees.
I am not sure I understand (the term "code in staging" is unknown to me). Are you suggesting that someone else is already working on updating the driver version upstream?
Code in "staging" means that it is in the drivers/staging tree of the kernel source. Each kernel version update gets many patches that are aimed at fixing the ugly code of the original Realtek driver in the hopes of moving from drivers/staging to the regular drivers/net/wireless/realtek tree of the kernel source. The code quality must be much higher in the latter tree than it is in the drivers/staging tree. The base driver version in drivers/staging/r8188eu is v4.1.4_6773.20130222. If you are happy with that, all you need to do is run a kernel 5.15 or newer. I do not know what version was used to create the driver in drivers/staging/rtl8188eu. Larry