Re: How to get Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi working with Debian Bullseye on Pine A64+?
On Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 3:57 AM <oregano@disroot.org> wrote:
>
> Long story short - Debian was tried. Wifi didn't work. Armbian Bullseye was tried. WiFi worked. All was good, more or less, aside from guilt from sin of using non-free hardware... But then, Distrowatch discussion of Raspberry PiOS rolling out "an update to the distribution which installs a third-party repository for Microsoft's VSCode packages" was observed coincident with Armbian updates querying a new, non-Debian, site. Paranoia or conscience motivated a return to Debian, Bullseye.
>
> Install, convoluted as it was, worked OK. Contrib and non-free were added to /etc/apt/sources.list, despite the shame. firmware-realtek was installed to get RTL8723BS firmware.
>
> Still no Wifi. Firmware is found:
>
> # find ./ -type f -iname rtl8723bs*
> ./usr/lib/firmware/rtlwifi/rtl8723bs_wowlan.bin
> ./usr/lib/firmware/rtlwifi/rtl8723bs_nic.bin
> ./usr/lib/firmware/rtlwifi/rtl8723bs_bt.bin
>
> Modprobe is attempted, but module is not found.
>
> # modprobe rtl8723bs_wowlan.bin
> modprobe: FATAL: Module rtl8723bs_wowlan.bin not found in directory /lib/modules/5.10.0-3-arm64
Can you check if armbian has the same kernel image? It's quite
possible that they
ship a kernel that is different from Debian's and that may have patches to fix
driver bugs in the mainline kernel, or that enables additional modules.
The mainline kernel only has a 'staging' driver for rtl8723bs, the
module name is
'r8723bs.ko'. There are two other drivers for related hardware, the modern
'rtl8xxxu' that only supports USB style devices, and a cleaned-up version of the
driver that is in staging, named 'rtlwifi' that also lacks support for
rtl8723bs but
supports some similar devices.
There are also various out-of-tree drivers for realtek wireless devices that may
have been included in armbian.
Arnd
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