8192cu in Gentoo [solved]

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1709

My old rt73 usb adapter was dying on me and I decided that it was time to upgrade. I purchased an Edimax EW7811 card due to several ratings I had seen that it works well in Linux with the rtl8188cu/rtl8198cu driver (That having been said, I would strongly recommend against this device - it's so small that the electronics of the computer mess with the signal and loses strength quickly). There was also an issue where after about 2 minutes of non-use the card would stop working. All signs indicated that I was still connected to my router, but it acted as though I wasn't connected at all.

I then purchased an Asus N-13. Another well rated for linux adapter that apparently also uses the same driver as the Edimax I had also picked up. This one seemed to work much better, except that it loses connection with my router much faster, after about 30 seconds of idle time. Now I'm thinking that it may be related to the driver itself so I do some research. Essentially, I discovered that the kernel driver is essentially trash. There seems to be something in the power saving code that prevents certain devices with this driver from powering back up when they go idle. I also discovered that I only needed to hit 'connect' again in the wpa_gui dialog to force a refresh, thus forcing the device out of idle again.

Further research and I discovered that Realtek themselves distributed an open source version of the driver that seemed to work well for people who discussed it in Ubuntu forums (particularly, though others were noted too). Additionally, forks of this driver were written in the open source community in order to support newer kernels and, in one case that particularly interested me, new options for the driver that will allow disabling of the driver's power saving option (exactly what would fix the problem for me).

I tried all 3 of these latter options. The Realtek driver won't even build for me (it comes up with a lot of errors that at a quick glance make me think that it needs an older kernel version, especially as the github drivers note specifically being written to support newer kernels). For both the second and third options, however, the driver builds and seems to load without error:

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1709

Figured it out. Buried in the Raspberry Pi forum I found someone mention that for the 8192cu (non-kernel) driver to work you have to use wext and not nl80211.

Here's the rundown of it all. If you have a device that would use the kernel rtl8192cu driver (and it will not work) with wpa_supplicant you'll need git and dkms installed. Then do the following.

ferrelas · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Jun 2008 Posts: 109

I'm grappling with getting this driver to work myself, I tried to follow the instructions here (with some modifications as I'm currently on a live cd), but I get stuck at 3.

this is what I do and what happens:

mlyszczek · n00b Joined: 02 Dec 2015 Posts: 8 Location: Poland

Sorry for digging out this topic from graveyard, but I have some informations for someone that struggles with this realtek chipset as well.

So, after you install (following alienjon instructions) patched 8192cu (NOT rtl8192cu from kernel - it is broken as we know) you might see something like this: